Parícutin
The volcano that rose from a Mexican cornfield in 1943 and erupted for nine years
On the afternoon of February 20, 1943, a farmer named Dionisio Pulido was preparing his cornfield in western Mexico for planting when the ground split open, hissed and began to smoke. By the next morning a cone of cinders taller than a house stood where the furrows had been, and within a year it rose more than 300 meters. Parícutin was the first volcano whose life scientists could follow from birth to extinction, and for nine years geologists, journalists and tourists watched it grow, bury two villages and fall silent. In 1997 CNN named it one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, the only one that people saw being born.
Parícutin stands in the uplands of Michoacán, about 320 kilometers west of Mexico City, among pine-forested hills dotted with older cones. It is the youngest of roughly 1,400 vents in the Michoacán-Guanajuato volcanic field, part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Its black cinder cone climbs about 424 meters above the old valley floor to a summit at about 2,800 meters. Around it spreads a field of jagged, dark lava covering about 26 square kilometers. From the village of Angahuan, visitors ride horses or hike across the lava to the cone and to the ruins of the church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, whose bell tower and altar still stand above the frozen flow that swallowed the rest of the town.
The eruption ran from 1943 to 1952, building the cone with explosive bursts of ash and cinders while lava flows crept across the farmland. The villages of Parícutin and San Juan Parangaricutiro were buried, and their people were resettled. No one was killed by the lava itself, but three people died from lightning generated in the ash clouds, and ashfall ruined crops and livestock over a wide area. Parícutin is a monogenetic volcano, a type that erupts in one episode and does not reawaken, though a new cone could one day open elsewhere in the field. Today it is protected within Pico de Tancítaro National Park and serves as a textbook case for volcanologists and a local source of tourism income.