Could You Outrun a Volcano?

Outrunning a volcanic eruption, like many things that look easy in movies or sound simple in theory, is more complicated in reality. Learn why you shouldn't attempt this feat in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hi, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb Here. It's a familiar cinematic situation. A
daring scientist arrives in town to study the local volcano,
which has been dormant for centuries but now seems dangerously
close to erupting. Despite the dire warnings of everyone around him,
the intrepid volcanologist, perhaps with a trusty and attractive assistant

(00:24):
in tow, insists on scaling the mountain to more closely
examine its condition. But just as the pair arrives at
the gaping crater, it blows, sending them running or possibly jeeping,
hand in hand down the slope, barely staying ahead of
the raging river of hot lava. Seeing any number of
these exhilarating scenes might leave you wondering what would happen
if I suddenly needed to escape from an erupting volcano.

(00:46):
Could I outrun the lava and make it to safety? Well,
technically yes, If lava were all you had to deal with,
ball scrambling down the side of a fiery mountain, you
might be in the clear. Most lava flows, especially those
from shield volcanoes, the less explosive type are pretty sluggish.
As long as the lava doesn't find its way into
a tube or shoot shaped valley, it will probably move

(01:09):
slower than a mile per hour. For example, the lava
flow from the Mauna Lower eruption of nineteen fifty was
clocked at six miles per hour. That's nine kilometers per hour.
You probably wouldn't have any trouble scurrying away from that.
There have been examples of fast moving lava, but there
are few and far between, like when the Democratic Republic
of Congo's mountainear A Congo erupted in nineteen seventy seven.

(01:31):
Its lava was measured going forty miles per hour that's
sixty four kilometers per hour, and at least two thousand
people lost their lives. The unfortunate truth, though, is that
lava will be the least of your worries if you're
close enough to an erupting volcano that you're thinking about
running for your life. Contrary to what we might see
in the movies, the dangers of a volcanic eruption are
not confined to burning hot lava. Even if you could

(01:53):
stay ahead of the lava, you'd never survived the pyroclastic
flow that's the accompanying burning hot, fast move in cloud
of ash, rock, gas, and debris. Pyroclastic flows are the
worst when they come from the more dramatically explosive composite volcanoes,
but they generally move at speeds greater than sixty miles
per hour a k a nine kilometers per hour and

(02:14):
reach temperatures between about two hundred and seven hundred degrees
celsius that's around four hundred dred degrees fahrenheit. By many estimates,
the pyroclastic flow from the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius
in seventy nine reached four hundred and fifty miles per
hour or seven hundred kilometers per hour. There's obviously no
way anyone's out running that. And if the pyroclastic flow

(02:36):
happens to melt snow or a glacier, this creates a
lahar and extra deadly concrete thick mud slide slash avalanche combo.
So if you one day find yourself flirting with danger
on the rim of an erupting volcano, we hate to
say it, but your toast. Today's episode was written by

(02:59):
Alison Cooper and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on
this and lots of other myth busting topics, visit our
home planet as stuff works dot com