40 Fun Facts About Paricutin

Paricutin stunned the world in 1943 by bursting out of which unlikely spot in western Mexico?

A cornfield belonging to Dionisio Pulido split open on 20 February 1943, and a day later a smoking mound about 50 metres high stood where he had been getting ready to plant.

No one was killed by Paricutin's molten rock, but what side effect of the eruption killed three people?

Lightning sparked inside the eruption's own debris clouds struck three people, the only deaths in nine years of activity.

Paricutin, the volcano that appeared in Mexico in 1943, takes its name from what?

A village it buried gave the volcano its name: the settlement of Paricutin, once home to 733 people, was emptied in June 1943 and has vanished completely under the flows.

Paricutin is the only volcano on a famous 1997 list of seven natural wonders, alongside which waterfall?

Victoria Falls shares the list with Paricutin, the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef, and the volcano is the only one of the seven that people watched take shape.

Which building still pokes above the lava that Paricutin poured over the town of San Juan Parangaricutiro?

The church kept its tower and altar clear of the hardened flow, and the half-swallowed ruin is still a pilgrimage site where visitors leave candles and flowers.

The first smoke rising from Paricutin's fissure carried hydrogen sulfide, which made it smell like what?

Rotten eggs is how the family working the field described the stink as the ground hissed and swelled; within hours the crack beside them had become a small crater.

Paricutin wiped two whole towns off the map, so why was everyone able to get out alive?

The lava moved slowly enough for families to pack up and walk away: the first town was cleared the day after a tongue of molten rock began creeping towards it in June 1943.

The 1997 disaster film Volcano cites Paricutin as a real-life precedent for a volcano appearing in which city?

Los Angeles gets a Paricutin of its own in the film, when lava wells up from the La Brea Tar Pits and Tommy Lee Jones's character has to divert the flow through the streets.

What did farmer Dionisio Pulido reportedly leave on his land when Paricutin forced him out for good?

A sign claiming ownership, announcing that the volcano was owned and operated by Dionisio Pulido, is said to have been his parting joke after it swallowed his farm.

Paricutin is a textbook example of which volcano type, the most common volcanic landform on Earth?

Cinder cone volcanoes pile up from blobs of gas-charged lava that harden in mid-air and rain back around a single vent, which is how Paricutin could rise so fast.

Paricutin rises in which Mexican state, also famous for monarch butterfly sanctuaries and Day of the Dead?

Michoacán, sometimes called the soul of Mexico, counts the young volcano among its best-known sights; it stands roughly 320 km west of the national capital.

For weeks before Paricutin erupted, deep underground rumbling was mistaken by locals for what everyday sound?

Thunder was the natural guess, yet the skies were clear: the noise came from magma shifting far below, and on the day before the eruption the ground shook about 300 times.

The guided trail to Paricutin crosses agave fields and groves of which fruit, the region's signature crop?

Avocado orchards surround the area, and the nearest city, home to the big packing houses that ship the fruit abroad, bills itself as the world capital of the crop.

Guides from the nearest town usually take visitors most of the way up to Paricutin by what means?

On horseback is the usual way across the rough lava fields, but the last few hundred metres are so steep that everyone has to scramble up on foot.

Decades after Paricutin fell silent, rainwater seeping into its still-hot interior keeps producing what?

Steam still drifts from the crater because the rock inside stays hot, and earthquake swarms in 1997 and 2006 showed that the forces which built Paricutin are still at work.

What were Dionisio Pulido and his family doing on their land when Paricutin opened up beside them?

Burning cleared brush was part of readying the plot for spring planting; Pulido was about to light another pile when he noticed a crack half a metre deep on a small rise.

Which news network put Paricutin on its 1997 list of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World?

CNN drew up the list in 1997, setting a mountain barely half a century old beside wonders that took millions of years to form.

Which Indigenous people, once called Tarascans by outsiders, farmed the land around Paricutin in 1943?

Purépecha words name the four stages of the eruption, and the highland towns that lived through it are still largely Purépecha communities today.

Families from the two towns lost to Paricutin were first housed in camps beside which city, 29 km to the east?

Uruapan sheltered the evacuees on its outskirts, and many of them went on to found a new San Juan only a few kilometres from the city.

William Foshag, the geologist who documented Paricutin for years, was a curator at which US institution?

The Smithsonian curator of minerals reached the site about a month after the first blast and kept studying the volcano's rocks and gases until his death in 1956.

Which Hollywood star led Captain from Castile, the 1947 epic filmed with Paricutin erupting in the background?

Tyrone Power and thousands of local extras worked beside the live volcano, whose drifting plume often spoiled the light and helped make the shoot one of Hollywood's costliest.

The picture book Hill of Fire, which retells how Paricutin appeared, was featured in 1985 on which PBS series?

Reading Rainbow built an episode around Thomas P. Lewis's book, which brought the Mexican farmer's story to a generation of young television viewers.

Paricutin's fountaining bursts of glowing rock belong to an eruption style named after which Italian volcano?

Stromboli lends its name to Strombolian eruptions, mild but relentless blasts of glowing fragments, and Paricutin kept them up for an unusually long nine years.

Which airline's planes reportedly detoured on Mexico City flights so passengers could see Paricutin erupting?

Pan American crews are said to have swung off their regular route so travellers could look down on the smoking newcomer, a sightseeing stop no timetable had planned.

A side vent that opened on Paricutin in late 1943 was named Sapichu, a local Indigenous word meaning what?

Child, or young one, was a fitting name for the small offshoot, which opened at the foot of the main cone in October 1943 and stayed active until early January 1944.

Paricutin grew by hurling out rock fragments up to the size of a walnut, which volcanologists call what?

Lapilli, Latin for little stones, fell like hail around the vent and built a mound about 50 metres high within the first 24 hours.

A cracked lump of lava thrown from Paricutin in 1949 is a type of volcanic bomb named after which food?

Bread-crust bombs earn the name because the outside hardens in flight while gas keeps swelling the molten middle, splitting the skin like the top of a baked loaf.

Which Mexican painter and volcano expert set up home beside Paricutin and published a book on how it grew?

Dr. Atl, the name Gerardo Murillo painted under, took up residence at the volcano, filled canvases with its fire and in 1950 published his account of watching it grow.

Before Paricutin, which volcano that rose from Mexican farmland in 1759 was the country's last brand-new one?

El Jorullo broke out about 80 km to the southeast, wrecked what had been rich farming country and went on erupting for 15 years.

Paricutin exists because the Rivera plate and which other oceanic plate are sinking beneath Mexico?

Cocos plate rock slides under Mexico along the Middle America Trench, feeding the chain of volcanoes that runs some 900 km across the middle of the country.

Which term describes a volcano like Paricutin that erupts in a single episode and then never again?

Monogenetic volcanoes fall silent for good once their one eruption ends, so the next outbreak in Paricutin's volcanic field is expected to break ground somewhere new.

Which town that survived Paricutin's eruption is now the main gateway for tourists heading to the volcano?

Angahuan looks straight across the lava field to the volcano, and its residents work as the guides who lead visitors to the crater and the ruins.

Paricutin smokes behind the Cholula scenes of Captain from Castile, echoing which volcano active there in 1519?

Popocatépetl was erupting when the Spanish expedition reached Cholula, so the film-makers' live volcano handed their conquest epic an accident of historical accuracy.

Which animals did Dionisio Pulido try to rescue from his land as Paricutin opened up beside him?

Oxen were yoked up for the day's work when the ground began to hiss; Pulido said he tried to free a team, could find neither the animals nor his family, and fled to town alone.

After nine years of eruptions, about how high did Paricutin stand above the valley floor where it began?

424 metres was the final tally, and roughly four-fifths of it had piled up by the end of the first year.

Which star of the 1954 Western Garden of Evil filmed scenes among the lava-locked ruins beside Paricutin?

Gary Cooper shot there with Susan Hayward and Richard Widmark, seven years after an earlier Hollywood epic had shown the same volcano in mid-eruption.

Paricutin grew on the flank of which far older peak, the highest mountain in its Mexican state?

Pico de Tancítaro is an extinct volcano that last erupted more than 200,000 years ago; Paricutin broke out about 11 km to its northeast.

Which peak is the only mountain besides Paricutin on the 1997 list of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World?

Mount Everest is the planet's highest point, while its fellow wonder is a heap of loose rock that went from flat field to finished mountain in under a decade.

Paricutin is the youngest of roughly how many volcanic vents scattered across its home volcanic field?

1,400 vents dot a plateau about 200 by 250 km across, most of them small volcanoes much like Paricutin with equally brief histories.

Dionisio Pulido was working beside which relative, named Paula, when Paricutin burst from his land?

His wife Paula was helping clear the plot when the ground swelled; the couple lost each other in the panic and met again in town, where friends had feared him dead.