Virunga National Park in Africa’s Great Rift Valley teems not only with a rich array of plant and animal life but also with a chain of towering volcanoes.
Virunga National Park in Africa’s Great Rift Valley teems not only with a rich array of plant and animal life but also with a chain of towering volcanoes. Two of these—the gently sloping Nyamulagira and its steep-sloped neighbor Nyiragongo—account for 40 percent of Africa’s historic volcanic eruptions. Diverging tectonic plates in East Africa allow magma to rise to the surface and fuel the volcanic activity.
Space-based observations of Nyamulagira (or Nyamuragira), a massive basaltic shield volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are frequently foiled by cloud cover. But a relatively clear window in early 2025 allowed a glimpse of its ongoing eruption. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired this image of the dynamic volcano on February 20. The natural-color scene is overlaid with an infrared signal to distinguish the lava’s heat signature.
The youngest lava flows are darkest in appearance. Several branch to the west from the summit crater, while one runs to the northwest. Heat emanates from what may be a lava lake in the summit crater. A thermal signal also appears near the end of a southwest-trending lava flow, approximately 3.3 kilometers (2 miles) from the crater’s west rim.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
