The Mesmerizing Blue Fire Of Kawah Ijen Volcano

The astonishing blue flames from the Kawah Ijen volcano often look like lava, but they’re actually just molten sulfur.

If you gaze upon the Indonesian Kawah Ijen volcano at Nox , you ’ll receive a life-threatening mix of beauty and toxicity . staring liquified sulfur that , upon making contact with air , combusts and smolders , creating a incandescence remindful of depressed flak and slop down the sides of the 8,660 feet grandiloquent vent .

The substance is not lava , as some assume . It ’s easy to make that mistake , though , seeing how the sulfur seep from the mountains offer and turn to liquid as it continues to flow . The event ’s combustible nature ( the gases are a forbidding 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit ) and noxious gases can create flame bursts up to sixteen feet in high spirits .

Source : National Geographic

Kawah Ijen Volcano

Most of the amazing images that follow are courtesy of Olivier Grunewald . Grunewald , a photographer by trade , accompanied a group of sulfur miner into the volcano to document these unfearing somebody as they fag away at a job that is probable one of the most dangerous in the cosmos . For the miners , trekking along a practical river of sulfuric acid and retrieving solid pieces of pure sulfur to channel to a weighing post is all in a Clarence Day ’s work on Kawah Ijen vent .

And while Grunewald was able-bodied to sport a gas mask during his volcanic ventures , many of the miners who know this reality daily are left with only squiffy cloth as masks , since the masks they ’re given need fresh filter that the mineworker can not afford to buy themselves .

For all the jeopardy need , the payout is n’t great : pure atomic number 16 sells for roughly 25 cents per pounding . These photos depict the strange phenomenon occurring at Kawah Ijen ; inquiry geologist Cynthia Werner state National Geographic , “ I ’ve never seen this much sulfur flowing at a vent . ”

Photos Of Kawah Ijen Volcano