This is the unlikely, not-supposed-to-be-here story of Margaret Mangan, the first woman to lead the eruption response team at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Margaret lives in Hawaii National Park, where home is a bungalow in a rainforest on the 4000 ft summit of Kilauea volcano.

When not chasing lava, Margaret studies classical ballet in a century-old school house in Volcano Village, wanders through the park’s tangle of tree ferns and ginger with her children, and, on the front porch late at night, sits beside her husband nursing dark stout.

Although she holds a PhD from the distinguished Johns Hopkins University, the degree is, in her mind, a Plan B achievement attained after the failed balletic attempt of her teens and early twenties. Ballet training is not often a springboard to a career in geoscience, and Margaret Mangan had no such design. But on a whim, after failure, and under pressure from a domineering older sister (who, although herself a dancer, held a passion for rock strata), Margaret set out to become a geologist.

The Mangan sisters were born and raised in the mid-Atlantic city of Rockville, so it may be that destiny played an early hand in Margaret’s surprising pivot into the Ring of Fire…