One of the most explosive volcanoes in U.S. history began its eruption with a trickle, not a blast. Mount St. Helens' gas-laden magma oozed into the cone before the mountain finally erupted in 1980.

Volcanic eruptions on the remote island of Nishinoshima repeatedly wipe the land clean, giving scientists a rare chance to study life’s earliest stages. Researchers traced the genetic origins of an ...

They want to drill into a magma chamber and put some monitoring equipment in the hole. … That would give us some idea of what’s going on in there.” The project is called the Krafla Magma Testbed, or ...