Volcanoes and Lightning Make For A Beautiful Apocalypse

I’ll bow down to Mother Nature’s forces when it’s called for. I won’t drive far in a hurricane. I won’t camp in the snow. And I definitely won’t ever again creative miniature tornadoes just because the blender is broken. Considering I never even considered a combination of lightning and an erupting volcano before, please pardon me for barking in fear at random intervals.

If German photographer Martin Rietze intended to make Hollywood and Photoshop look like amateur hacks, he’s done it. Japan’s Sakurajima Volcano, in southern Kyushu, was a hot spot of beautiful disasters from February 21-26, and Rietze made the most of his skills, capturing some of the most amazing natural images from this planet I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen like seven pictures in my life.

These first few images below are just really great-looking pictures that could easily be souvenir postcards from Disney’s Volcano Eruptions, and then the lightning comes alive and the Universe becomes a distant memory. Wait, these are just pictures. The heater kicked on and I thought I was done for.

Hang on to your dumbass, non-lava-resistant, lightning-rod hats, because these images might just imprint themselves upon your eyeballs.

And as a close up from Hell and back. Sleep well tonight.