All photos © Bernard Edmaier. Mount Merapi at dusk, Central Java, Indonesia.

“Every time a volcano erupts, we are violently reminded that we live on a fireball,” geologist Angelika Jung-Hüttl writes in the introduction to Bernard Edmaier’s new book, Earth on Fire: How Volcanoes Shape Our Planet, recently published by Phaidon. Texts by Jung-Hüttl that discuss how volcanic activity has altered the natural landscape in beautiful and fearsome ways accompany beautiful aerial photographs Edmaier took throughout the world. Photographers will appreciate Edmaier’s large-format images of volcanic eruptions, lava floes and other fiery activity in places like Mount Etna, Sicily, and his more abstract, artistic compositions depicting land formations and other geological phenomena, like the Painted Hills in Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which were formed as layer upon layer of volcanic ash settled in the area millions of years ago. (more…)