A Sample of Inferno

Volcanologists like to analyze the lava of new volcanoes, but getting the lava samples can be a sticky business. Last week two scientific adventurers from San Diego, Adrian Richards and Lewis Walker, told about their dangerous visit to El Boqueron (Big Mouth), the new volcano on tiny San Benedicto Island off the west coast of Mexico. They were the first to set foot on the still-smoking cone.

When they started for the volcano on board the research yacht Observer, they had been told that its activity was dying down. This report, they found, was premature. A great hole had opened in the side of the cone 150 ft. above sea level, and a tumbling flood of orange-hot lava blocks was building a hissing delta. The two men crept as near as they dared and estimated the lava's temperature as about 2,300DEG F.

At night the delta glowed like the door of a great furnace. The lava coming out of the hole was brilliantly white-hot. It dulled to orange and then to red as it neared the boiling sea.

During their first day on the dangerous island, Richards and Walker climbed the cone and descended 200 ft. into the crater, often sinking to their knees in fine lava dust. They watched steam escaping from a hole 6 ft. across "with a roar that you would expect from 100 jet planes."

Two days later, while Richards and Walker were camped at the foot of the cone, the volcano blew its top. A vast cloud of black smoke billowed out of the crater, almost from the spot where they had waded in the lava dust. It rose to a great height; then its steam condensed and fell as a scalding deluge of muddy rain. Richards and Walker escaped in a skiff, rowing madly, and took refuge on a tuna boat.

When they got back to San Diego, their lava samples were analyzed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They seem to be "acidic," which would prove, according to Scripps Man Richards, that the volcano is a continental type in spite of its position well out from the continental shelf. It may get its lava from a deep-down magma reservoir like those which have fed volcanoes on the Mexican mainland.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.