On Tuesday The Philippines evacuated around 20,000 people from the slopes of Mt. Mayon, one of the country's deadliest volcanoes, as plumes of ash exploded skyward and lava oozed down its upper slopes. 
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology ordered everyone out of a six-kilometer (3.7 mile) radius around the volcano. The institute judged a devastating eruption to be imminent.
Mayon is a stratovolcano, the cone-shaped variety that are both the most beautiful and often the most deadly. Mt. Fuji in Japan is a stratovolcano. So is Mt. Kilamanjaro in Tanzania, just over the Kenyan border.
More ominously so is Mt. Pinatubo, like Mayon on the Philippines main island of Luzon. In June 1991, Pinatubo erupted in fury, the second largest eruption recorded in the 20th century. Weeks of preparation had seen 60,000 people evacuated from the surrounding area before the eruption, but it still claimed about 800 lives, mostly due to houses collapsing under the weight of accumulated ash.
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