On April 22, 2015, a stratovolcano in southern Chile called Calbuco erupted for the first time in 42 years. Filmmaker Martin Heck was in the area shooting a neighboring volcano, when Calbuco came alive. He fixed his cameras on its undulating plumes of ash. This gobstopping time-lapse is the fruit of the images he captured.
We spend the prior couple of days on the neighboring volcano Osorno (~20km linear distance) shooting timelapses. After an amazing night under the nightsky we took the cable car downwards after a delay caused by repairs. Already late we headed south to catch the ferry on Routa 7 down to Patagonia. After 10min on the ferry we noticed a massive, almost nuclear looking cloud boiling upwards just were we left a few hours ago. Frenetically looking for a good outlook we then rushed to the only non-forested place to get a decent view of the show. We quickly put every bit of camera-equipment we could find on the constantly growing mushroom-cloud. We shot timelapses in 8K and 4K with a Pentax 645Z and Canon 6D. On the A7s we shot 4K video to the Shogun using Kingston HyperX SSDs. We filled almost all of our memory cards in the prior night so I had to do backups while shooting all this stuff.This was for sure the most incredible show I’ve ever seen. I think this is a one in a lifetime event and I am so happy that we were able to capture it in all its glory.
If you’ve ever seen the way ink spreads immediately after it’s injected into water, you’ll notice that it bears a striking resemblance to the billowing plumes of Calbuco. As Nicole Sharpe explains at FYFD, that’s no coincidence.
[Martin Heck via FYFD]
Contact the author at rtgonzalez@io9.com.