Lava Pot Volcano

Don't ask us how that bridge hasn't burned down yet.

Volcanoes are some of the most impressive and dramatic setting devices in fiction. You've got the constant threat of eruption and the brilliant and deadly rivers of molten rock, a perfect place to set a climactic encounter. As such, fictional volcanoes are typically very visually striking things, covered in streams of lava and shrouded in clouds of glowing cinders. Should a daring adventurer climb their treacherous slopes and peer over the rim of the crater at their peak, they'll see the most striking feature of all — the great lake of molten rock at the mountain's heart where the ground is stripped away to reveal the glowing blood of the earth, eternally roiling, smoking and bubbling to itself until the time comes to overflow its bounds and send waves of burning rock flowing towards the plains below.

In extreme cases, the amount of molten rock may be visibly greater than that of the solid kind, making the whole thing appear as a kind of rocky bowl or bottle precariously holding in the mass of lava.

However, volcanoes with permanent lava lakes are in reality extremely rare — in fact, of the approximately 1,350 active volcanoes in the world, only eight have one. In all other volcanoes, molten lava is only present during or shortly after their eruption, after which the lava quickly cools and solidifies. In fact, successive explosive eruptions will often blast through different sections of a volcano each time. Rather than being open wounds in the earth, stratovolcanoes, the looming, explosive volcanoes that feature most heavily in fiction, are more like crusted-over scabs, being essentially solid mountains on top of hot spots in the planet's crust.

However, since realistic volcanoes are insufficiently dramatic, and perhaps also because the most popular pictures of volcanoes are taken during eruptions, all volcanoes in fiction tend to be portrayed as full-time seething lava pots.

In video games, this is a common form taken by the Death Mountain. When directly explored, these lava pots will often also be Lethal Lava Lands.

Related to Appease the Volcano God, which invariably takes place in this type of volcano, and Artistic License – Geology. Subtrope to Lava Pit.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Pokémon: The Original Series: In "Volcanic Panic", Cinnabar Island Gym Leader Blaine has moved his gym inside the island's volcano due to a dislike for the hordes of tourists attracted by the hot springs. The gym consists of a platform suspended over a lava pool inside a cavern; after this is destroyed in the weekly altercation with Team Rocket, Blaine and Ash hold a rematch over a different lava lake in the volcano's crater.

Film — Animated

• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa has a volcano that always has lava ominously boiling in the water and erupts if things are thrown into said lava.
• Moshi Monsters features a volcano that spews lava out of its front and into a lake surrounding it 24/7. This lava never bothers anyone near it.
• My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): The crater at the peak of the Volcano of Gloom is filled with a lake of bubbling lava, which the witches use to brew the Smooze.
• Shrek: The castle where Princess Fiona is imprisoned is located on an island in the middle of a clearly volcanic crater that's full of lava.

Film — Live-Action

• Joe Versus the Volcano: The volcano, complete with natives, sacrifices, and a sea of molten lava.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: The heart of Mount Doom is a chasm filled with roiling, smoking, roaring lava, in which Sauron forged the Ring and into which it must be cast again. In the book, it's just a "crack of fire", contents not clearly specified.

Literature

• The Fire's Stone: The entire country of Cisali is kept safe from a volcano that is permanently bubbling over with hot lava by a magic stone that keeps it contained. Once the stone is stolen, the lava rapidly starts rising again.
• The Silmarillion has the trio of gargantuan volcanoes known collectively as Thangorodrim, which are said to have been made by the Dark Lord Morgoth himself as he was delving his fortress Angband into the earth below. They were the tallest mountains in all of Middle-earth during the First Age, perennially churning out smoke and occasionally spewing lava from their tops.
• The Wheel of Time: The heart of the Blight is Shayol Ghul, a huge black volcano with a lake of lava open to an Alien Sky. Justified by its Thin Dimensional Barrier to the prison of the Dark One, which lets him warp reality within the mountain — such as by enabling his followers to stand directly above the lava.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering has the Urborg Volcano, a stout, constantly erupting peak with slopes crossed by rivers of lava.

Video Games

• Don't Starve: Each Shipwrecked world contains one of these, shaped like a rocky cone with a top filled to the brim with lava, somewhere on the map. You can even climb inside to find it has its own ecosystem consisting of cactuses, reptiles, and "coffee bushes", along with an altar to Appease the Volcano God with.
• Dwarf Fortress: Because of the way volcanos are generated, they almost always have this appearance when they break the surface. Typically, their "pool" is simply the top of a very tall lava-pipe extending down to the magma sea deep underground. This can actually be a great boon to a fortress focused on metalworking, or, to a crafty fortress planner, a ready means of killing invaders with magma.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy: Mt. Gulg is the home of the Fire Crystal that governs the balance of fire in nature, leaving it perpetually filled with lava even in its innermost recesses, restricting movement to maze-like paths throughout the volcano's interior.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Hells' Lid is a volcano located in the Ruby Sea that is perpetually smoking and filled with lava, having created numerous islands nearby it from the lava plumes it has shot into the surrounding ocean. According to legend, the flaming volcano is home to a host of oni, but in actuality, its interior has been converted into a magically guarded safe haven for the auspices who guard the seal restraining Koryu, the mad auspice who tried to set the entire Ruby Sea ablaze.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • Depending on the game, the Volcanic terrain type is typically decorated with entire mountain ranges of volcanoes, many of which are filled with lava (or constantly mid-eruption).
  • Heroes of Might and Magic V: Both the Inferno and Fortress factions have their towns built on the interior of a volcano with a lake of lava at the bottom. Inferno is built on a tube of rock emerging from the volcano's center, while Fortress is built descending the walls of the mountain. It fits in with that game's larger-than-life town screen designs.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The crater of Death Mountain is, in essence, a large lava lake featuring a handful of islands and a large temple carved into the earth underneath. The mountain erupts every time you're on the pathway leading to the climbable wall that scales up to the summit.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has two: the mountain on Dragon Roost Island (heavily implied to be the same Death Mountain as the one in Ocarina of Time), whose internal dungeon consists of caverns arranged around the huge lava lake at its heart, and the one directly south that comprises its own small island called "Fire Mountain". The latter is constantly spewing lava out from its top.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The version of Death Mountain depicted in the game is similar to that of Ocarina of Time, except that the crater itself is a dungeon, or at least part of one: the Goron Mines, whose central chamber consists of a series of platforms and bridges arranged over the lake of molten rock at the mountain's top.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has Eldin Volcano, which only erupts the third time you visit it. The rest of the time it's a Lethal Lava Land with rivers and pools of molten rock visible everywhere.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The slopes of Death Mountain are crossed by rivers and lakes of glowing lava, ultimately pouring from the perpetually seething lake of molten rock in its crater.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Downplayed. In the years since Breath of the Wild, the lava on the surface and in the caldera of Death Mountain has receded. However, there are still numerous tunnels just below the surface that are still full of Lava Pits.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire: The peak of Mt. Chimney, Hoenn's tallest mountain, is filled with an immense lava lake that constantly rains volcanic ash over the route to its north. In Emerald, the Legendary Pokémon Groudon sleeps within this lake.
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: In the base game, Stark Mountain is a fairly sedate rocky peak. In Platinum, the crater on its peak contains a pair of bubbling, smoking pools of lava.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus: Firespit Island is a volcanic islet whose central depression is filled with a number of perpetual lava lakes.
• Tekken 2 canonically ends with Heihachi throwing his son Kazuya into one of these. Thanks to the power of the Devil Gene and the assistance of G Corporation, Kazuya recovers from this and eventually does the same back to his father in 7, presumably killing him off for real this time.
• Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: The volcanic islands exaggerate this as all contain multiple craters. Whether they're ever-flowing mountains, vertical chimneys, or lava lakes below the other features, all contain lava seething just below the rim of the vent. Some islands even have tiny side vents sticking out in seemingly random directions with a surface of glowing lava visible just barely inside. There's a particularly spectacular example at the Dorlinor Isle disaster site, where a meteor impact punctured the local volcano's magma chamber and caused the impact crater to overflow with lava.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The mountain where the Panda Lily grows in "The Fortuneteller" is topped with a seething pot of lava. However, this is apparently not its usual condition, as Aang recognizes that it's near an eruption because it's a seething pot of lava.
• Dungeons & Dragons (1983): In the episode "Servant of Evil", all the kids except Bobby the Barbarian are captured by Venger and locked away in his "Prison of Agony", which is in the middle of a huge volcano crater that is — yup — filled with red-hot lava. The only way across is a bridge that is raised and lowered using a control lever so massive that only a giant can move it.
• Futurama: In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", the members of the Star Trek cult were executed "in the manner best befitting virgins", by being thrown into a volcano filled with hot lava.
• The Simpsons: Subverts this in "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo", where the family goes to Japan and has to compete on a game show in order to win airline tickets back to the US. The tickets are on a rope bridge over an active volcano that looks like this — but which, unknown to the family, turns out to be just a prop.
• TaleSpin: "Pizza Pie in the Sky" has Baloo team up with Louie to run a pizza delivery service, using the Sea Duck as a flying kitchen. When Baloo loses the pizza oven out the loading ramp, he decides to cook the pizzas by flying around in an active volcano's caldera, depicted as a rocky bowl filled with a large lake of molten rock. Baloo and Kit survive the process with ice blocks tied to their heads. Convection, Schmonvection proves highly arbitrary, as the volcano's heat does indeed cook the pizzas, but doesn't make the Sea Duck's hull sizzling hot, overheat its engines, nor set ablaze its tanks of aviation fuel. Toon Physics at their finest.

Real Life

• Volcanoes with perpetual or semi-perpetual lava lakes do exist, but they are very rare — so rare, in fact, that only eight are known for certain. These are Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose lava pool is the largest and deepest; Erta Ale in Ethiopia, whose lava lake is the oldest, having been continuously active since 1906; Mount Erebus in Antarctica; Mount Yasur in Vanuatu; Kilauea in Hawaii, whose original lake drained off when an eruption breached its sides in 2018 but was replaced by a new one in 2020; Ambrym island in Vanuatu; Masaya in Nicaragua; and Mount Michael in the South Sandwich Islands.

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