Erta Ale

Erta Ale means “Smoking Mountain” in the local Afar language. It is a large basaltic shield volcano in the central northern Danakil Depression in northeastern Ethiopia and forms part of the East African Rift System. Erta Ale is only 613 m high, but as typical for a shield volcano, has very gentle slopes and a large 40 km diameter base. The summit is truncated by a complex, elongated caldera which contains one, sometimes two long-term lava lakes that have been active since 1906. Volcanoes with lava lakes are very rare. There are only eight in the world*. If you want to have information on the activity of Erta Ale before you decide visiting, check the following link: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/es/erta_ale.html

*Seven of the known persistent lava lakes are Mount Nyiragongo (DR Congo), Erta Ale (Ethiopia), Mount Erebus (Antarctica), Ambrym and Mount Yasur (Vanuatu), Kilauea (Hawaii) and Masaya (Nicaragua). After 30 years of suspecting its existence and location, a team of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and University College London, has finally confirmed number eight – within the crater of a remote, subantarctic island volcano.The newly confirmed lava lake is located within Mount Michael, an stratovolcano on Saunders Island, one of the remote South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic.