As Gondwana tore itself apart 165 million years ago, the rifting unleashed a series of eruptions the likes of which we hope will never be seen again

Explosive eruptions were a feature of Gondwana Karsten Wrobel /ImageBroker/Rex

Welcome to hell on Earth, aka the Paraná-Etendeka province, circa 135 million years ago. The time-travel tourist slogan? “If the dinosaurs don’t get you, the volcanism will!”

By the time you arrive, the southern remnant of Pangaea, Gondwana, has already spent millions of years pulling itself apart, separating what we now know as South America from Africa. This rifting was one of the factors that created the red-hot cataclysm you’ve come to see. As the rift worked its way north, Earth’s crust became thinner. Meanwhile, a superheated portion of the mantle was welling up, heating the crust from below. Eventually, magma broke through and flooded across the landscape. The modern-day remnant of this is called the Paraná-Etendeka traps, expanses of basalt covering more than 1.3 million square kilometres of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Namibia and Angola.

For the most part, this would be like the volcanism that gave us Iceland – passive, gentle and only rarely explosive. You didn’t come here for gentle, though. Happily for thrill seekers, a lot of the magma is rich in silica. “That’s the key to explosive eruptions,” says Sarah Dodd of Imperial College London. “Silicic magma is highly viscous and so it traps volcanic gases. These build up, and ultimately propel magma explosively towards the surface.”

The Volcanic Explosivity Index gives you an idea of what’s in store: the eruption you’re here to see has the maximum ranking of 8, which is described as “apocalyptic” (one ranking above “mega-colossal”). This score is given to any event that ejects more than 1000 cubic kilometres of rock, as the supervolcano …