Réunion island is located in western Indian Ocean, 700 km east of Madagascar. It's a french oversea land of 2.512 square kilometers inhabited by around 700.000 people.
Geologically, this very young island is situated over a hotspot in the middle of an earth-block, like Hawaii archipelago. The constitutive volcano is up to 7.000 meters from the oceanic crust, with 3.000 meters over the sea level.

On the panorama, you see the main volcano on the island, "Piton de la Fournaise" (2.632 m.), dominating a caldeira horseshoe-shaped opened to the sea. The volcanic activity is not obviously concentrated on the top of the mount but everywhere in the caldeira, like the actual, around 1.650 m height, begun on november 16. For the last 4 years, the earth opened ten times for an average duration of eleven days. In march 2002, the lava reached the sea.

Of course, nobody is living in this area. A net of sensors is monitoring the underground activity and sends datas to an observatory 20 kilometers away. Pedestrian access is restricted, and the easiest way to see this spectacle is by air, or by QTVR, or both !