Tamsyn Mather

There's incredible stories of the conquistadors erecting crosses over Messiah volcano in Nicaragua to guard the escape of evil spirits from its mouth.

But since the modern era of science, we've been able to understand much more about our planet's internal structure and using seismic waves, which are basically the vibrations that we feel coming through the Earth when there are big earthquakes, for example, we can record those.

And we can learn a lot more about the internal structure of the Earth.

And what we find is that most of the Earth is solid rather than having any pockets of melt that stay there all the time.

The very inside of the Earth, there's a liquid outer core.

But the mantle, which is the bulk of the Earth, this is about 65% of Earth's mass, is actually most of the time solid.

And it's only in these very special circumstances where it melts.

and you get magmas generated that feed volcanoes.

Yes, absolutely.

You're doing well just a few centuries out of date.

Exactly.

So this is not far in the same way as a bonfire or a fire that we might have in the grate at Christmas time or something like that.

Nothing is burning with volcanic heat.

The rock is red hot when it comes up to the surface.

So many of the things that we refer to as fire in a volcanic sense actually aren't fire at all.

Nothing is burning.

There's nothing you can put out.

Things just cool down.

So it's a very different type of process.

We're getting better and better, but it's still really, really challenging.