Mount Etna is quite the mercurial mountain, isn’t it?

Over the last few weeks, it’s been erupting fairly angrily and putting on quite the show, spewing lava down its slopes, firing out lava bombs, and sending columns of ash billowing up into the sky. Generally, it’s been a bit of an attention seeker.

However, when a team of BBC News reporters attempted to climb to the active vent to have a closer look, a sudden phreatomagmatic blast almost killed them. That’s just rude.

While you cannot trust the sneaky and violent volcano to behave, you can’t argue that its lava flows are nothing short of mesmerizing. As captured beautifully by a recent risk-taking cameraperson, lava is continuing to ooze from the legendary mound’s active crater.

^{Etna's new flows. Mt Etna Map via Storyful}

It’s not currently endangering anyone, but if the eruptive activity of the Sicilian monster picks up, history tells us that we’ll have a bit of a fight on our hands to push back the lava – or at least divert it with high-explosives.

Hopefully someone’ll catch the lava during blue hour, a photogenic time of day where the rising or setting sun coats the ground in a gorgeous, deep blue hue. Someone managed to spot this optical phenomenon happening in Hawaii recently, where a lava flow took on a rather otherworldly appearance.