Rosaly Lopes can recall the exact moment when she decided to become a volcanologist. “During my college days, I was taking
this class — Geology of the Earth and the Planets — and one day the professor did not show up,” she explains. Eventually someone
announced to the class that Mount Etna had erupted and the pro-fessor was on his way to Sicily to study it. “The volcano erupts and the professor has to go? That’s what I want to do,” she recalls, smiling from ear to ear. From that moment for-ward, Lopes knew which career path she would follow, even if it was covered with 2,000-degree Fahrenheit lava. Since then, she’s been to active volcanoes on all seven continents, including Mount Erebus in Antarctica.