“We are volcano eaters! But sometimes the volcano may eat you. That is always the problem: who will eat the other?” So said, Maurice Krafft, French geologist, who with wife Katia, researched, photographed and filmed volcano eruptions for over 20 years.

There are extreme sports, but none compares to volcano watching.

Its adepts are a legion of scientists, naturalists and thrill-seekers who cannot get enough of the fix of experiencing a lava stream, or a pyroclastic flow or the ultimate high: a volcano eruption.

Of over 1500 active volcanoes the world over, 20 to 40 are erupting at any one time. In volcanodiscover.com, a company that packages travel to the world’s most active of volcanoes, an updated news guide, tells connoisseurs of the volcanoes to watch.

The list is impressive: lava flows at Italy’s Etna and at Galapagos’ Cerro Azul, pyroclastic flows and rockfall avalanches at Semeru in East Java, ash plumes at Chile Chaiten, and most recent, pyroclastic flows and intense activity in Costa Rica’s Arenal.

The Arenal volcano is the most striking among Costa Rica’s five active volcanoes, as the others Irazu, Poas, Turrialba, and Rincon de la Vieja are astoundingly beautiful, but are given to lesser pyrotechnics.

The Arenal Volcano is a baby “geologically speaking” as it was born on January 1968, when what was known by the region’s inhabitants as a cerro or hill, woke with a vengeance killing 68 people after a deep slumber that lasted half a millennia.

Eliecer Duarte, vulcanologist at the National University’s Observatorio Vulcanologico y Sismologico de Costa Rica (OVSICORI), has been studying the Arenal for years. “The volcano is a young 40 years,” he explained.

“It had been asleep for over 500 years; so dead that people didn’t think it was a volcano,” said the scientist.

“Many volcanoes give surprises; the Arenal hill did not open its conduit to give way to its reactivation,” he said, “actually, a lateral gash opened on the west side and formed three secondary craters, the last of which has been active for 40 years burying the other two.”

Nothing since has equaled the force of that original explosion, whose lava traveled 45 kilometers.
In comparison, the volcano’s recent activity is mild.

“The pyroclastic flows or hot avalanches have been occurring since June 6 when part of the summit ollapsed,” he says.

Mr Duarte explains that the spectacular Arenal avalanche seen in the cover picture was one of the more benign ocurrences, as pyroclastic flows can be fatally destructive.

One such avalanche from Montagne Pelee, Martinique in 1902, caused the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century: 28,000 people died in St Pierre, located seven kilometers (about four miles) from the volcano’s summit.

In an incident closer to home, Jorge Barquero, a retired Costa Rican vulcanologist escaped death by a few minutes in 1993 when he walked away from the crater of Colombia’s Galeras, leaving behind six colleagues and three hikers during a research trip. A sudden eruption ensued scalding and crushing the unfortunate scientists.

“The mass that comes down the volcano has the effect of a shovel–a chaotic mass can travel kilometers,” explains Mr Duarte.

Although, it may have been a small avalanche, the clouds of the powdery ash that rose with it more than a thousand meters into the sky, may have traveled many kilometers depending on the winds.

“The view from the Observatory Lodge is the south of the volcano, whereas the flow was traveling southwest,” said the scientist at OVSICORI.

Effectively, hikers on the trails approaching the base of the volcano –still kilometers away– came back to the Observatory Lodge, covered in the fine gray dust, wide-eyed, slightly disoriented and immensely relieved.

Mr Duarte says a recent dust cloud originating from a pyroclastic flow on June 10, traveled as far as four kilometers.

Despite the unlikelihood of being reached by the incandescent gases when beyond two kilometers, volcanoes, even the Arenal has shown there is no immunity from tragedy.

In August 2000, a pair of hikers and a guide were caught in a pyroclastic flow. The guide managed to pull the gravely injured hikers from the burning trail, but died days later with one of the hikers.

“They are intimidating events,” said Mr Duarte, “even the milder flows travel between 80 to 100 kilometers per hour, and can dissipate in under ten minutes.”

Although trails that once ventured to upwards of the base of Arenal have been closed-off in recent years, guides and more aggressive tourists have gone beyond the safety points.

Volcano watchers like Mr Duarte can rattle off the dates and even times of significant eruptions.

“There were big ones in 73 and 93; and more recent ones in August of 2000, May 2001, September 5 2003 and two other minor ones last year.”

Other committed volcano watchers live for the next eruption.

Costa Rican businessman and volcano photographer Federico Chavarri­a Kopper, whose aerial photograph of a perfectly still Arenal volcano in a clear day, won accolades in the 2007 World in Focus competition, sponsored by National Geographic Traveler and Photo District News, says he was hooked from the age of nine.

“I lived in San Carlos and my father would take me to all the volcanoes,” he explains.

Mr Chavarri­a Kopper, who collaborates with OVSICORI, has two twin engines airplanes and often flies over the volcanoes during heightened activity.

“I always have my cameras with me,” he says adding that his fascination with volcanoes has taken him to other volcano sites in Central America and Monserrat Island.

“One is filled with adrenalin,” he says.

Although well-traveled in the realm of volcanoes, Mr Chavarri­a Kopper still prefers to monitor the volcanoes in his country.

“Rincon de la Vieja is stunning,” he admits, “but I prefer Arenal, so beautiful at night.”

It is safe to be near the Arenal Volcano, say the experts, although Mr Duarte warns of their unpredictability.

“There are guides who may still take some people to the summit of Arenal,” he says, “but I call that suicide tourism.”

“If you stay within a prudent distant, and we manage to avoid overdevelopment near the base of the volcano, then, the area is very safe.”

In the spring of 1991, while filming an eruption near Shimabara, Japan, Maurice and Katia Krafft and American geologist Harry Glicken, died instantly, enveloped in a heat cloud generated by a lava explosion at Mt Unzen. The heat cloud killed 43 people, including journalists, cab drivers and farmers.

Reprinted by Permission - The Beach Times