Geology typically requires a suspension of our everyday sense of time to be appreciated. If you stare at a rock for a minute or two, you’re unlikely to be rewarded with much action—unless you throw it. But that doesn’t do it for everybody.

What does do it for just about everybody is volcanoes. Big, violent volcanoes. Angry mountains spewing their molten guts high into the atmosphere, with fiery blobs and bits flying everywhere. Of course, such sights are preferably taken in through the comforting insulation of a television set—even a relatively calm volcano like Hawaii’s Kilauea demands serious precaution.

But what if you could get up close and personal with a real-life, mesmerizing lava flow—minus the imminent personal danger? A recent story in Earth Magazine describes a project at Syracuse University that results in on-demand lava flows in a college parking lot. Crushed basalt is melted in a specialized furnace, and the resultant lava is poured out for all to enjoy. Volcanologists get to study flows in controlled conditions, and the public gets to freak out about how cool it is. (OK, the volcanologists surely do that, too.)

Ironically, the crushed basalt comes all the way from the failed rift responsible for Lake Superior rather than the relatively nearby (successful) rift that formed the Palisades along the Hudson River. Given that the Palisades basalt is about 200 million years old, this is the closest thing to volcanism that the piece of the North American plate we now call New York has seen in a very long time.

