Five metres…
Two metres…
Oh my God.
If you took in one breath, it was going to kill you.
It looks like the surface of the sun.
It looks like all of my wildest dreams.
It was certainly visual heroin.
Ambrym, Vanuatu, is one of the most
active volcanoes in the world.
Geoff risked everything to try and reach
its famed lava lake, Marum.
God, that took from, I don’t know about 15 years.
Probably a million dollars.
The first successful expedition was in 2012.
I think we had had roughly 25 or 30 days of bad weather,
and we finally got a good weather day and we managed to get to the bottom.
The best part about this is on the way down
it's all gravity.
Nathan, I'm starting to move now on belay.
To be honest I was never worried about the lava at all.
Rockfall was our biggest fear of all.
So if you're halfway down inside the volcano
and it rains, you’re getting rocks raining down around you that the rain has caused,
as well as battery-acid-strength acid rain.
Trying to clear rocks.
Oh, this is not good.
Yeah, kind of hell.
We're about 150 metres above the lava lake.
As you can see, we've come a long way
and it's mind boggling.
And there's the goal down there.
That's the cursed lava lake that's
sucked up my money for 15 years.
And many futile attempts to get here.
As we got down the cliff and I realised it was actually going to be successful,
Yeah, it was, it was pretty good.
And I wasn’t waiting to put the suit on,
I wanted to have a quick look.
5 metres…
2 metres…
Oh my God.
Oh Jesus.
You have no idea how ridiculously small you look.
Severe radiant heat doesn't go round corners,
it's like light.
Until you’ve actually walked to the edge and could actually see the lava.
Then you were hit by a wave of heat that was, you know, much like putting your
head in a furnace, I guess.
It was beyond my wildest dreams.
You could only withstand that heat for a matter of seconds before you had to
turn away.
Am I close enough to the edge?
I can't go any closer.
But if you took in one breath of that superheated air, it was going to kill you.
I’m getting a sun tan!
What does it look like?
Looks like the surface of the sun.
It looks like all of my wildest dreams
into one moment.
Once I came back with the breathing apparatus and the heat suit on and everything,
I was able to stay there for like three quarters of an hour.
You wouldn't believe how hot that was
when those big pulses of lava come up.
If it wasn't for the air from the breathing tanks and the heat suit,
it would probably just about kill you.
Even with the heat suit on it's like being in an oven.
One or two minutes, even with the breathing apparatus, all this stuff on.
The lava’s probably 30 metres away
and it's just the most incredible heat.
There’s nothing…
There's nothing to describe it.
Nothing on Earth, it’s like looking into the sun.
It's kind of cool.
I still reckon that shot is one of the greatest volcano shots of all time.
How many unsuccessful attempts were there before we got down?
I don't know, probably a dozen at 100,000 each.
Yeah, a lot.
It wasn’t just the weather holding Geoff back.
Uh, you know, there were some crazy incidents.
There was one occasion our helicopter got hijacked.
Another time the boat got hijacked,
along with all our stuff.
So it was like the wild west.
We finally ironed all those out.
We finally got to the bottom.
Geoff returned to the lava lake many more times.
What kind of happened when we first got people to the bottom,
we started taking private people who had enough money to pay to do it.
That became quite successful.
(What sort of clientele did you have?)
I can’t even tell you.
We've had a member of a royal family.
I can't tell you any more than that.
I can tell you I was pretty...
how would I put it... ******* myself that we didn't lose a member of the royal family
because I guess I'd be in hiding somewhere.
Everything was going well.
We were finally getting what we thought was going to be a good viable
business going on this remote island.
But in 2018 an unexpected fissure changed the volcano forever.
In late December, this fissure eruption opened up on the side of Marum.
What it actually did was that it emptied the lava lakes.
There appeared to be a number of earthquakes, including a very big one.
Whether the magma chamber was empty, we don't know, but for some reason
the whole of Marum and Benbow caved in.
Well, at first I didn't really believe the scale of what people were telling me.
And so I wwent up to the island and went up there in the helicopter
and that's when we realised that as we approached the island
I realised straight away that the whole place had destroyed itself.
We came, we succeeded, all in good time, of something that no longer exists.
In a way that makes it even better.
You know, we can truly say that we've stood on ground that no one else did
And no one else ever will stand on.
It’s kinda cool.
Humans are certainly not in charge of this planet.
We're just, you know, at the mercy of nature.