Mount Nyiragongo
Nyiragongo
Interesting facts
- At its fullest, before 1977, the lava lake was estimated to be as much as 600 metres deep.
- Nyiragongo's lava is made of rare low-silica, feldspar-free rocks such as melilite and nephelinite, which explains its extraordinary fluidity.
- Lava from Nyiragongo can race downhill at up to about 100 km/h, among the fastest lava flows ever recorded.
- Nyiragongo and its neighbour Nyamuragira together account for some 40 percent of Africa's historically recorded volcanic eruptions.
- The volcano rises to about 3,470 metres and partly overlaps two older volcanoes, Baruta and Shaheru.
- Although local people knew the glowing crater well, the lava lake was not scientifically confirmed until 1948.
- During the 2002 eruption about 400,000 people fled Goma, most of them crossing the border into Gisenyi in Rwanda.
- The 2002 lava flowed over the northern end of Goma's airport runway and covered roughly 13 percent of the city.
- Pockets of carbon dioxide seeping from the ground around the volcano, known locally as mazuku, can kill animals and people who stray into them.
- After the 1977 eruption Nyiragongo was named a Decade Volcano, one of sixteen singled out worldwide for special study.
Why it is worth it
Nyiragongo's crater holds the largest lava lake on Earth — a churning pool of molten rock roughly 1.2 kilometres across, so active it's been continuously molten since at least 1971, which makes it one of only a handful of persistent lava lakes anywhere in the world. Most volcanic craters are dry between eruptions; this one simply never stops.
That permanence is also what makes Nyiragongo unusually dangerous. Its lava is exceptionally low in silica, which makes it far more fluid than the thick, slow lava of most stratovolcanoes — closer to water than to the syrup-like flows typically pictured when people imagine an eruption. In January 1977, the crater floor fractured and the entire lava lake drained in under an hour, sending flows racing downhill at speeds reported as high as 60 km/h, fast enough that an estimated 2,000 people had no chance to outrun it. A second catastrophic eruption in January 2002 sent a 13-kilometre fissure of lava straight into the outskirts of the city of Goma, destroying large sections of it and leaving more than 100,000 people homeless overnight. A further eruption in 2021 again sent lava to the edge of the city, killing more than 30 people and destroying several outlying villages, a reminder that Goma — a city of roughly two million people — sits permanently in the path of a volcano that has already run this exact scenario twice in living memory.
Despite the risk, the volcano remains one of the few places on the planet where a working lava lake is directly observable at close range from the crater rim, drawing volcanologists and, more recently, permitted trekkers willing to camp overnight beside the glow.
Getting there
18 km from Goma. Goma International Airport (GOM) is about 17 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mount Nyiragongo is an active stratovolcano with an elevation of 3,470 m (11,385 ft) in the Virunga Mountains associated with the Albertine Rift. It is located inside Virunga National Park, in the North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 12 km (7.5 mi) north of the town of Goma and Lake Kivu and just 9.8 km (6.1mi) west of the border with Rwanda. The main crater is about two kilometres (1 mi) wide and usually contains a lava lake. The crater presently has two distinct cooled lava benches within the crater walls – one at about 3,175 m (10,417 ft) and a lower one at about 2,975 m (9,760 ft).
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