​​​This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you just jumped into a pool of lava?

The human spirit burns bright and hot. Few things on this planet burn hotter than the human spirit. Lava is one of them.

Sure, I think we all know which might win if a pool of lava and a human body got into a fight. That's obvious. What's less obvious, however, is what exactly happens between you flinging yourself into certain doom and your body incinerating into nothing. Life, they say, is all about living in the moment, so let's examine the final moments of you resting in a pool of molten rock.

To do this, we spoke with Adam Kent, a volcanologist and the geology program director at Oregon State University. If there's one person who might be able to give a satisfactory answer to our burning question, it's him.

So much of our collective understanding of the relationship between lava and humans has been shaped by movies and television. Perhaps through some combination of limited production design budgets and not enough consultation with subject matter experts, popular culture would have us believe that the first thing that would happen if you jumped into a pool of lava is that you would sink. This is wrong. You would float.

Kent points to the work of his peer Erik Klemetti in Wired, but the simple fact is that lava is basically liquid rock. Your body is not nearly as dense as rock, and thus makes it extremely hard to sink. This doesn't mean you're saved from a fiery death, only that you're just be kinda bobbing on the surface of the lava — an even more hellish version of a waterbed.

This floating feeling doesn't last forever, though. Before the extreme heat of the lava wipes out any physical evidence of your existence you must first explode. "The basic idea is that the gases in a body would expand rapidly and probably cause a series of minor explosions," says Kent.

You see, your body contains gases. When heat is applied to gases they expand. When gases expand in a confined space, they increase in pressure. When the thing containing those pressurized gasses fails you get a release of pressure. Sometimes it's unremarkable, like a hissing tire going flat. Sometimes it's violent, like chucking a 66-pound bag of trash into the Erta Ale volcano. It's possibly the best approximation of what might happen if a human were to take the plunge. "Rubbish from the bag gets trapped in the magma, then breaks down to gases which expand and cause some explosions over a period of several minutes," explains Kent.

So you float, and then you explode. Now let's get to the obvious part. Lava is very hot. Basaltic lava — the kind that's found in those Hawaiian volcanoes you know and love — reaches temperatures up to 2000 F. Not only is this enough to burn you, but Kent suspects that it's so hot you'll likely be unable to flail around, much less even scream. "I think that you would be pretty rapidly overcome by heat, both conductive and radiant," he says. "If you are ever near an active lava flow the radiant heat is crippling at quite some distance from the lava — let alone lying right on top."

It might sound like an extremely dramatic thing to do, but jumping into a pool of lava is roughly the equivalent of throwing an ice cube into a deep fryer. Sure there might be some explosive bubbling for a few minutes, but within seconds the cube will melt and the oil will resume being hot as heck. As far as ways to exit this mortal coil, it's maybe not the worst.​