Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The joy of volcano-chasing

Mary Wakefield talks to the director of a new film about two doomed scientists who set off to the edge of every crater like a pair of mad moths drawn to a candle flame

Charming and funny but tough as nuts: Maurice and Katia Krafft. Credit: Image’Est

Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’.

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