The first one is so surreal it looks like a 'shop job.

People were talking about Pinatubo back there...

Pinatubo put ash over two miles straight up in the first few minutes of eruption.
The ash cloud left the area in pitch darkness for almost 24 hours, visibility at like, 100 feet.

And it wasn't the biggest in "recent" history, as CyclopONE said.

And guess who lives at the foot of a "dormant" volcano? (you know they're never reeeeeeally gone...)

Yangminshan, the one rigth behind my apartment, put almost a kilometer of ash down over Taipei, ten or fifteen thousand years ago.

And I'm sure some of you've heard what'll happen if Yellowstone goes up? It's about due for a supereruption, sometime in the next... ten thousand years.

yes. they are stunning.

This reminds me of high school in New Zealand and the volcano by Lake Taupo erupted. You could see the lava flow at night from Te Kuiti and wake up nose burning and cars covered in ash, sometimes an inch thick. I think it only took one car dealership to learn the rest of em that volcanic ash and water removes paint due to the high sulfuric something content, ie acid...