Why do people live by volcanoes despite that they can erupt?
At first it may seem odd that people would want to live close to a volcano. After all, volcanoes have a nasty habit of exploding, discharging liquid rock, ash, poisonous gasses, red hot clouds of embers, and generally doing things that kill people. Yet, throughout history, people have deliberately chosen to risk all those hazards and live near them, even on the slopes of active volcanoes that have erupted within living memory. They chose to live close to volcanoes because they felt that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Most volcanoes are perfectly safe for long periods in between eruptions, and those that do erupt more frequently are usually thought of, by the people who live there, as being predictable. Today, about 500 million people live on or close to volcanoes. We even have major cities close to active volcanoes. Popocatapetl (pronounced poh-poh-kah-teh-peh-til) is a volcanic mountain less than 50 miles from Mexico City in Mexico. In short, the main things that attract
