The Elephant’s Foot, a highly radioactive corium glob that formed beneath the Chernobyl reactor during the 1986 disaster, looks remarkably like a cooled basaltic flow. “Blue lava” is also not lava.

In Hawaiian lava caves, colors that emerge after volcanic eruptions include a yellow-gold coating of microbial colonies (first) and blue and purple oxidation on cooled drips of once molten rock.

One way to find water worlds beyond our solar system could be to look for minerals — or more specifically, to study minerals mixed with cool lava on exoplanet surfaces. This is because if water ...

cactus-like flower blossoming out of a mound of resin made to look like cooled lava recently extruded from a volcano. To make the sculpture series, Edmier developed new techniques for pouring ...

Scientists usually use the color of the lava as a rough indicator of how hot it is, with red being “cool” (about 1,472 °F), orange being slightly warmer (about 1,472–1,832 °F), and yellow ...

Since the Aug. 31 eruption of Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano, the world has watched in awe as it spews glowing red lava into the desolate ... eruption underneath cool and ethereal haze of the ...

The natural-color image below shows a close-up view of the volcanic plume and eruption site. A dark ash plume rises directly above the vent, and a short, inactive (cool) lava flow partially fills ...

You don’t really know what’s inside unless you dive into the void. Lava caves, formed from cooled lava flows underground, are found near shield, basalt volcanoes across Earth. These lava tubes ...

Some minerals in lava could suggest water is nearby. One way to find water worlds beyond our solar system could be to look for minerals — or more specifically, to study minerals mixed with cool ...