Watch What Happens When You Fly A Drone Into A Volcano

An image from a Drone and GoPro
trip into the Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland.  

The Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland is still erupting spectacularly, so a couple of guys decided to fly a drone as close as they could to the spouting lava to get a good look.

(As an aside, I think "Bardarbunga" is an excellent name for a volcano, or anything for that matter.)

Anyway, you'll see the video they took below. The two guys were Eric Cheng, of DJI Phantom, which makes the drone they used. Photographer Ragnar Sigurdsson attached a GoPro camera to the drone.

The whole account, in Wired, of what happened is pretty cool.  Cheng managed to get the drone faithfully back from the volcano, despite radio transmission problems caused by the volcano.

It turns out the heat from the lava melted and destroyed the GoPro camera, but the memory card for the camera was intact, so they got the video.

The two men got closer to the volcano than local officials wanted them to, because it was so dangerous The day after they were there, a caldera wall in the volcano collapsed, suddenly flooding the spot they were standing with a flash flood of hot lava.

Yikes!

Here's the wild video, h/t Gizmodo.