Erta Ale
Interesting facts
- Haroun Tazieff and Giorgio Marinelli led the Franco-Italian expedition of 1968 that brought the first scientific team to the summit lava lakes.
- Measurements at the lava lake have recorded temperatures of up to about 1,217 °C, with the lake surface regularly throwing lava fountains several metres high.
- The summit caldera is an elongated oval roughly 1.6 km long and 0.7 km wide, holding the pit craters where the lava lakes churn.
- The European explorer Antoine d'Abbadie reported the volcano in 1841, and the German naturalist Johann Maria Hildebrandt climbed it in 1873.
- Its broad basalt shield spreads over 30 to 50 kilometres in diameter, so the volcano is far larger than its modest 613-metre height suggests.
- In 1972 the lava lakes overflowed and flooded the caldera floor, and in 1992 a crater collapse buried the northern lake under debris.
- In 2019 only about eight volcanoes in the world were reported to hold lava lakes, making Erta Ale one of a very small club.
- Werner Herzog filmed the lava lake for his 2016 volcano documentary Into the Inferno, and the BBC mapped the crater with 3D laser scanning in 2009.
- Erta Ale's neighbour in the same range, Hayli Gubbi, erupted in November 2025 for the first time in about 12,000 years.
Why it is worth it
Erta Ale rises only about 613 m above the salt flats and lava fields of the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia's Afar Region, and from a distance it hardly looks like a mountain at all - a broad, low shield of black basalt. Its fame lies at the top. The name means "smoking mountain" in the Afar language, and for more than a century the summit has held one, and at times two, lakes of molten lava. The lake has been observed since at least 1906, which makes it the longest-lived lava lake known anywhere; only a handful of volcanoes on Earth hold such lakes at all.
The volcano is the most prominent of the Erta Ale range, and it exists because the ground here is being pulled apart. The Afar region sits on a triple junction where the African, Arabian and Somali plates are separating, part of the rift system that continues into the Red Sea, and much of the depression lies below sea level. Erta Ale's lavas are basalts of the same kind that form new ocean floor, and the landscape around it - glassy black flows, cracked crusts, steaming fissures - gives a rare glimpse of a continent beginning to split.
The spectacle is best after dark. From the rim, visitors look down into the pit at glowing lava under a shifting black crust, the light growing stronger as the night deepens. The southern pit is known locally as the gateway to hell. The activity changes over time: an eruption in 2005 forced local herders to evacuate, and an eruption that began in January 2017 fed lava flows on the flanks until 2020, with pulses of activity continuing into 2024.
The setting is among the harshest inhabited places on Earth, home to Afar herders. Most visitors reach the volcano on organised expeditions that also take in other sights of the Danakil Depression, walking up in the evening cool and sleeping on the rim to watch the lava through the night.
Getting there
The nearest town is Arerti, about 38 km away, but expeditions start from Mekele, whose Alula Aba Nega Airport (MQX) is about 120 km in a straight line. The drive from Mekele to the base camp at Dodom takes around six hours over lava and sand; from there the walk to the crater rim takes about three hours, usually at night, with camels carrying water and bedding.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Erta Ale is a continuously active shield volcano in the Afar Region of northeastern Ethiopia, which is itself part of the wider Afar Triangle. The volcano is located in the Danakil Depression, an area on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea that is below sea level. It is composed of basalt, and it is the most active of the volcanoes in Ethiopia.
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