Voiceover: Nyiragongo is a real dangerous volcano. 2 million people living around there could suffocate of carbon dioxide, but in the night you realize there's more behind that curtain of steam and organic smoke. For me there were no doubts I wanted to go down there and it was a very special moment to be so close to hell.




Carsten: Thank you for your interest this evening and I would say we just begin. This is me in the tender age of 15 years and I was already obsessed with volcanoes. I bugged my parents until they went with me to Etna in Sicily. When I looked in the big fucina grande I was kind of lost. I changed my life and I got the desire to always climb down into these craters.




And it took me until '99 for my ultimate volcano kick when I directed an expedition to Vanuatu into a deep, live abyss was probably the most violent lava lake in the world. It's about 1500 feet deep and it was a very special moment to be so close to hell. You felt like directly on the magma chamber. You felt the vibrations, the shocks. It was like a big washing machine and a heavy gear. It was just amazing and bombs were flying around you, so I got so addicted I always wanted to see the biggest lava lake in the world.




And this is the travel I want to take you on. I would take you now into the heart of Africa. Into the Democratic Republic of Congo and worse, into the war-driven Kivu Province. Now I will do an excursion to 2002. There was a big eruption of Nyiragongo. 8 mile fissure opened and the lava lake drained and flooded Goma City and 4500 houses were destroyed, 14 villages, 170 people lost their lives and we had 400,000 refugees, so that means Nyiragongo is a real dangerous volcano and it has very little monitoring because the Congolese, they love to recycle the instruments of the scientists. There are solar panels and batteries. All things they can use in a better way. A few parts of the city are life threatening. Invisible gas springs become like natural traps for kids and animals and this is strictly unmarked. You have these gas traps filled with carbon dioxide. These are called mazukus. Even worse are the dangers of the Lake Kivu. It's one of the world's exploding lakes. There are only 3 of them and Lake Kivu is by far the biggest. In its steps there are huge quantities of gases of carbon dioxide and methane. Over half a billion tons are stored there and an earthquake or a volcanic eruption might destroy the equilibrium and it could pop up like a shaken bottle of carbonated water. So, it's very, very dangerous. So you could fear tsunamis or the people-- 2 million people living around there could suffocate of carbon dioxide. A limnic catastrophe of the lake would be really unimaginable. It happens every thousand years, every millennium, that all life is extinct around that lake.




But the surrounding of the volcano is very fertile, so you find almost everything you can imagine; wood, fruits, all sorts of vegetables. People already cut the wood in the fields and then this is transported down with very strange wooden bikes. They are called tshukudus and they are loaded up to 1500 pounds. And so they race down these gentle slopes of these volcanoes and provide the markets with all you can imagine. So, A tshukudu can do quite a good living. It's like a truck driver in our society. They carry down everything like this charcoal. It's a wanted commodity in Goma because they cook with it, but there are uncounted illegal charcoal kiln in the forest and it's an immediate threat to the trees down there. Despite, there are these layers of methane in the depths of the lake so if that would be better organized, you could directly save the mountain gorillas living around these volcanoes because these forests are the last wild remaining areas where these mountain gorillas survive.

Here you see the giant flanks of this volcano. It's a huge caldera with a diameter of 3 quarters of a mile. These are the 1st views for us down there to the biggest lava lake so we have to make our thoughts how we get down there, but 1st we have to get up there. So, Nyiragongo is more than 11,000 feet high and we had to carry a lot. We have to carry everything up there; water, food, scientific gear, climbing gear. So we needed 107 porters to do all that. They were very happy. For them it's a great opportunity and they were amazing. They could do, in a day, a months salary so these jobs were really seeked by the porters. And we had, of course, guards because this is kind of a conflict area and the mountain is always taken again by rebels and it happened short after our expedition that the mountain was taken by the rebels again and I think it's still not freed. I mean, the national park doesn't have control over it and more than 130 rangers have been killed in the last 15 years. So, it's a big problem. But our porters have been in a very good mood up to the top where it was quite cold. It's getting down to freezing temperatures because of the altitude and then you see, in the first moment, not very much.




I mean, everything is filled up with gas and we thought, Well, that's not a nice surprise. I expected to see something glowing and whatever, but in the night you realize, Well, there's more behind that curtain of steam and organic smoke. And then it opens and then you see it's like a giant theater. You see this incredible lava lake illuminating the steep walls of that caldera and we built up our base camp on the summit. This is our cooking tent. Always was this incredible view down there and it's always changing the surface of that lava lake so it's a really incredible spectacle.




This is Ken Sims our volcanologist and he was a former mountain guide and he was doing all the rope work to get down there. We looked to the 1st terrace, which is only a small relict. The 2nd one was much bigger and the 3rd one was a lava lake situated in the midst. And this is where we aim to. We wanted to stay there one week. The scientists had a lot of experiments lined up and here we constructed Tyrolean to get all the scientific gear down there. So, we made a campsite on the 2nd terrace which had its advantages because it had ground heating. It was quite warm and very pleasant compared to the summit and, of course, we were closer to the lava lake. So it was absolutely mesmerizing. So I knew that would be my home for the next week and I was really happy to finally be so close to the volcanism and we observed this kind of miniature plate tectonics in the lake, so it was really amazing just to observe what's going on. The hottest lava in the world, 2400 degree Fahrenheit. That's probably the reason why this lava lake is so big. And here the scientists are measuring the radon which comes from really big taps from the magma chamber and has a decay rate of 3.8 days. So they can make very valuable analysis about the lava of this volcano, but suddenly the scientists realized, Wow! There could be overflows off that lava lake and it could flood the 3rd terrace and it could flood quite hefty and you don't know exactly how stable these cinder cones of that lava lake are. And that kind of a relative way that their will to go down to the 3rd terrace. So, for me, there were no doubts I want to go down there and that was my goal, but the discussions came up and the scientists decided to go already after 1 day and I couldn't believe that so I have a little sequence with the scientists.




Carsten on the radio: Well, I still would like go down to the 3rd terrace and I just wonder what you are up to and what your plans are.

Man: Probably won't be going down to the 3rd terrace. Jesus, he really wants me to go down, doesn't he?

Man 2: I'm staying out of it.

Carsten: Well, you need a lot of ingredients for a good volcano picture. You need good activity. You need good visibility. You have to have patience and you have to have to outsit the right situations.




Well, I had a big problem and you see, I mean. It was really not a nice weather situation. I admit the weather was really poor the 1st day. It was acid rain and you almost couldn't breathe because that's the so-called rock, the volcanic smoke. Usually you take gas masks, but if you are hard work like here and you have to carry up equipment you can't breathe through the gas mask all the time because of the resistance. But everyone left after that 1 day and even my friend and assistant, he became ill and had to go up, so I had no other choice than to stay down there. Well, and I had nothing better to do than to photograph myself. But then I looked up and looked at this beautiful kind of vague lit clouds in the moonlight and I thought, Well, this is wonderful to have the whole crater for myself. But these were my only buddies down there. Two white necked ravens and they immediately stole my food when they realized my tent was open, but I was glad for them because otherwise it's kind of a death zone. Insects fly in the night to the lava lake attracted by the light and then they burn somehow their wings and then they fall down. Everything is covered by dead animals.




So the next day I climbed up to the 1st terrace to discuss with Ken.




Voiceover: Unwilling to take the risk himself, Ken asks Carsten to collect the 0H sample from the 3rd terrace. They will need to set two lines. One to get in, the other one to get out if the lava overflows. Up on the summit, Ken will spot the levels of the lava for the climbers on the final terrace who can't see the surface of the lake themselves because they are below it.

Ken: Do you see him? The activity is over on your side of the wall there. He's going back down. Whoa! Good job. Good job.

Carsten on the radio: It's incredible. I love it. I love it. I love it.




Carsten: I have been very, very lucky as you saw in the film. We climbed down to the 3rd terrace. That's the view if you are down on the 3rd terrace. Actually you can't see into the lava lake up there so it's kind of mandatory that you have to climb that cinder cone. And then you have these surprises because there's something like and infra-sound and it shakes your whole body, but you can't listen to it. It's very, very strange. I have never experienced that before. I imagine the whole crater is like a loud speaker and the membrane is the lava lake and if there are big bursts of gas you get the kind of resonance and it shakes your body. So very, very strange and you feel tiny, tiny, tiny. I mean, you see here my friend on the cinder cone and the lava lake is huge compared to that and the energy going away from that lava lake is unbelievable and hard to imagine. So it's a huge energy source and there are these gas bubbles coming out of that lake and ripping apart this liquid stone. Bubbles maybe 80 feet high and one day later Ken came really down and brought us the thermal suit. I was testing it first. I have to say these thermal suits are quite uncomfortable because they are insulating. It's very warm even if it's not warm outside, and you have a very restricted view, so very limited. So if there is lava flow or if bombs are flying it's quite dangerous, but you won't believe the next day, although Ken came down to the 3rd terrace, actually that's him here on the top of the cinder cone and he probably won't forget that for his life. I would have loved to stay a much longer time. Unfortunately, we were restricted and we had to go up again and made it up to the 2nd terrace to all these kind of very difficult parts with the 2nd terrace taking apart and there's a lot of rock fall. This is my last picture of this nasty volcanic smoke walk as beautiful as it can be.




I hope to see you maybe again in the future. Thank you very much.