Gallery | Volcanoes from Space 2 | Angling in on the edge of the abyss

Some of my favorite shots of volcanoes from space are not from satellites, but from the International Space Station astronauts. Most satellites look straight down, but astronauts suffer from no such limitation. This view of the Pagan volcano in the Marianas islands was taken in March 2012, when ISS was hundreds of kilometers south of the volcano. The narrow island actually has two volcanoes; one at each end separated by that isthmus. This area is where the Pcific plate is subducting under (going beneath) the Phillippine plate, which causes a lot of volcanic activity. It's also, not coincidentally, the location of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Earth's crust.

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Image credit: NASA

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