Artist and photographer Reuben Wu has very recently captured something absolutely incredible. He went to visit the volcanos of East Java and took some astonishing shots of flaming blue sulfur as it was making its way through the ground and streaming down the mountainside. At the very base of the Ijen volcano there is a place called the “Blue Fire Crater” where this kind of sulfur escapes from tiny holes deep in the Earth and when ignited turns into this majestic blue liquid. The resilient and highly professional Wu waited for the sun to set in order to capture these incredible images of this extremely rare phenomenon. Of course, you can imagine that a journey like that was anything else but easy. Reuben Wu had to trek up the bumpy side of the active volcano for more than two hours and then it took him another 45 minutes to get to the heart of the crater trekking down. The marvelous blue color of the fire he found there is caused by the ignited sulfur of course. The thing is that it had reached an amazing 600 degrees Celsius or 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit, which by the way could flare up to at least 5 meters or 16 feet into the air. The best thing is that this is not the only blue fire place in the world, as there are some more areas like this one around the globe but this one in particular is the biggest of them all and by far the most popular one.
So for sure, it goes without saying that these Indonesian treasures hidden deep in the Ijen and Bromo Tengger Semeru volcanoes are an absolute beauty and are constantly full of tourists (which is why the photographer had to wait until dusk for his pictures to be so delightfully perfect).
Here are some more of Reuben Wu’s amazing photographs:
