The World's Tallest Lava Fountains; Reached 22,000 Feet Altitude

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]What you are looking at are absolutely stunning  and towering lava fountains reaching a whopping 1,969 feet or 600 meters into the air during  the 2021 eruption of Spain's Cumbre Vieja volcano. This meant that ejected lava would  be airborne for upwards of 15 seconds. So, surely this lava fountain was clearly the tallest  recent lava fountain ever generated, right? Nope, not even close. In fact, the nearly 2,000  foot high lava fountains from Cumbre Vieja in this video clip would rank here...just kidding  they'd actually be all the way down here. So, which volcanoes produced the tallest lava  fountains ever recorded? The answer is Mount Vesuvius in 1779 and Mount Etna in 1787, which  produced sustained more than hour long 3,000 meter or 9,843 foot high lava fountains. Both of these  volcanoes are already tall to begin with, so that means that Vesuvius's lava fountains were ejecting  numerous bombs of lava to heights of 4,424 meters or 14,514 feet in 1779, and a whopping 6,403  meters or 21,007 feet at Mount Etna in 1787.

[00:01:20]While aircraft did not exist back then, if  something similar occurred today there would have been a danger of lava bombs hitting flying  commercial aircraft. For many decades, everyone just assumed that this aforementioned 3 kilometer  high lava fountain was completely fictitious, one of many exaggerations made by historical sources.  And then, on November 23rd, 2013, a sustained lava fountain was generated at Mount Etna, reaching  a sustained height of 2,300 meters or 7,545 feet above its erupting crater. And, according to one  scientific paper, this lava fountain for around 20 seconds briefly reached a whopping height of 3,400  meters or 11,155 feet. All of a sudden, the prior stated historical figures for lava fountains did  not seem all that implausible, and later evidence would increasing suggest that these 18th century  figures were indeed quite real and accurate.

[00:02:22]So, why do lava fountains form in the first place? As magma rises to shallow depths, gas in the magma comes out of solution, forming a gas bubble that  continues to expand at decreasing depths. This expansion propels adjacent magma upwards, ejecting  molten rock as a fountain of material. However, while the tallest lava fountains are associated  with eruptions that have a degree of explosiveness to them, they need to not be too explosive and for  the gas bubbles to not expand too much, else the molten rock is fragmented into many fine particles  of ash and no lava fountain forms. While this is not an all encompassing rule, that are generally  two scenarios which lead to towering lava fountain generation via distinct ranges of compositions.  First, we have what I term violent strombolian eruptions, where during a mildly explosive  volcanic eruption an episode of unusually high gas content magma is expelled, creating towering lava  fountains such as seen at Cumbre Vieja in 2021 or Nyamuragira in 2011. Since lava fountains require  abnormally high gas contents to build up, lavas tend to fall into the range of tephrite, basanite,  or trachybasalt. However, the true tallest lava fountains tend to occur when a fissure at  a volcano produces a sub-Plinian or Plinian eruption. This indicates an incredibly high magma  and gas supply, but part of the fissure has gas which does not expand so much that ash particles  instead of ejected lava form. This ideally occurs in a range of more viscous lavas that tend  to fall into the range of basaltic andesite, basaltic trachyandesite, or phonotephrite. One  example is the 2,000 meter high lava fountains generated during the 2024 Plinian eruption of the  Ruang volcano which can be seen in this footage.

[00:04:18]And now, here is a comparison chart for various  lava fountain heights. At the very bottom end, we have the typical 2 meter high lava  fountains generated by basaltic eruptions of Ethiopia's Erta Ale volcano, and 50 meters  high at Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano in 2022.

[00:04:36]Moving up we have the 60 meter high lava fountains  during a 2021 Piton de la Fournaise eruption, typical 90 meter high lava fountains at Yasur,  137 meters at the Reykjanes volcano in 2024, and 400 meters high at Fuego in 2015. The  tallest lava fountains at Fagradalsfjall reached 460 meters high in 2021, while the  tallest lava fountains ever recorded at Kilauea reached 579 meters or 1,900 feet high in 1959.  Cumbre Vieja's 2021 eruption produced 600 meter or 1,969 foot high lava fountains in 2021, Pacaya  produced an 800 meter high lava fountain in 2000, Villarrica produced a 1500 meter high lava  fountain in 2015, and Izu-Oshima produced a 1600 meter or 5,249 foot high lava fountain in  1986. Lewotobi and Ruang both produced 2 kilometer high lava fountains during sub-plinian and plinian  eruptions in 2024, whereas the rest of the list consists of eruptions from Etna and Vesuvius. As a final note, I would like to thank my YouTube channel member Baldevi for upgrading  their membership tier to this channel!