How Does Volcanoes 101 | National Geographic Work?

Volcanoes are like giant lava-filled cups that can burst open and spill hot stuff all over the place.

Imagine you have a cup full of soup. If it gets too hot inside, poof!, the lid pops off, and the soup spills out. That's kind of what happens with volcanoes.

Inside the Earth is molten rock, which is like super-hot lava. This molten rock is called magma. Sometimes, it moves up through cracks in the ground, just like soup rising to the top of a cup.

When the magma gets close enough to the surface, it can burst out, whoosh!, and become lava, spilling over the sides of a mountain or creating a new one entirely. This is how volcanoes erupt.

Think of a volcano like a pressure cooker. If too much magma builds up inside, it needs to escape somehow. The more pressure there is, the bigger the eruption, just like when you pop off the lid of a boiling pot and soup flies everywhere!

Sometimes, after an eruption, volcanoes can sleep for years or even centuries before they wake up again, ready to spill hot stuff once more.