Volcanoes are hot, very hot - no question about it! But how hot are they?

A rough and ready guide to the heat a volcano is generating is to look at the lava flow. You can get a fair idea of how hot the lava is from its colour. Incandescent rock, which lava is, shows the degree of heat like this:

Faint red signifies about 480°C
Dark / Bright cherry red at approximately 630°C
Orange / yellow at around 900°C

For comparison, a pizza oven operates at temperatures ranging from 260 to 315°C, a conventional oven in the home works in a range 190 to 240°C.

The temperature generated by a pyroclastic surge, or flow, also reach around 900°C! Temperature this hot explains what happened to the inhabitants of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, claiming more than 10,000 lives of the people of lived in of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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