SOME VIDEOS ARE WORTH SACRIFICING the equipment for. This video taken by National Geographic sent GoPro mounted drones directly into a volcanic crater in the island nation of Vanuatu in order to capture footage of a roiling pool of lava. It is footage that could not have happened before the creation of these drones, as the area around the pool is (obviously) incredibly hot, but also incredibly toxic.
Two of the team’s drones were destroyed in the attempt to capture the footage — one went directly into the lava, the other succumbed to the heat and to the instability of the air around the volcano — but the images that they managed to get of the crater were enough for them to build a first-of-its-kind 3-D reconstruction of the crater itself, which will help scientists study the microbial life that lives on the edges of these incredibly harsh environments. 