You’ve seen those quintessential volcano pictures from your Geography textbooks. Conical in shape, symmetrical slopes climbing steadily up to the crater peak. A tropical island on its own, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision islanders in grass skirts beating drums and hauling up offerings of game and fruit, and the occasional hapless virgin, up towards the fiery lava crater, all to appease the gods.
Well, here’s that perfect volcano as seen by said gods.
Or the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite. The island is Manam Volcano, off the coast of mainland Papua New Guinea, and it released a plume of smoke last month on June 28.
Smoking is bad, but this is a breathtaking picture, nonetheless.
Unrelated and totally off tangent, this picture also reminds me of the 2004 Collection from Prada. (I so need retail therapy right now.)
Tags: volcano
