The clip above is of a scientist getting too close to a lava lake. And just when you thought it was as easy as Frodo walking to the fires of Mount Doom, this one here is actually very scary.
Over on boingboing, Maggie Koerth-Baker drops some facts:
It only gets more tense when you realize that the volcano in question is Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — which has some of the fastest-moving lava flows ever recorded. The key feature of Nyiragongo is that lake of lava in the center of the crater that you see in the video. In January 1977, the lava lake was 2000 feet deep. When the volcano erupted later that month, the lake emptied dry in less than an hour. Lava was clocked at 40 mph. [emphasis mine]
