I confess: I have a volcano fixation. As a nine-year-old, I slept nervously in a camper van rather than the family tent while on a camping trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. I wanted to be ready for a midnight escape should the volcano decide to replay its explosive eruption of 1915. 

Lassen Peak stayed quiet that night, as it has for a century now, but that view from the campsite towards the imposing silhouette of the mountain, framed by a million stars, has never left me.