How far has anyone ever gone down into a dead volcano crater?
Jo
To Jo,
The stories about going down the throat of an old volcano are pretty much
science fiction. The last stage of most eruptions involves lava or ash or
debris falling back down the conduit so usually there are no long vertical
shafts to climb down. The deepest depressions are calderas, which are >1
km across. So, even though you are going a few hundred m into the volcano
you don't feel like you're going down a cave because calderas are so wide.
There are caves and lava tubes on the flanks of volcanoes and they can be
10's of km long, but you're not really going down into the volcano, more
like following the length of a flow but a few meters underground.
Scott Rowland, University of Hawaii