Question: If you fell into a volcano would you fall straight through the centre of the earth?

David Pyle answered on 22 Mar 2011:

No – in fact, in most volcanoes you can’t fall much further down than the crater. In active volcanoes, there will usually be hot magma within the feeding-system (which we call the conduit), and this will usually have risen up quite close to the surface. Molten magma is quite strong, even though it is hot and flows, and in most cases magma is too strong for a human to fall into. So if you fell into an active volcano you would perish, from a combination of the fall; the heat, and the high concentrations of toxic gases!

Even if you could withstand the heat and had some way of travelling down the volcano conduit, you wouldn’t get close to the centre of the Earth: most of the molten rock that erupts from volcanoes is formed only at depths of 60 – 100 kilometres. The distance to the centre of the Earth is about 6400 km.