A 30-year-old from Ormskirk will star in a BBC series exploring the insides of volcanoes and volcanic eruptions.
Chris Horsley toured archipelagos and towns in Italy, Congo, Iceland and the Canary Islands for the new TV show. On his travels he was almost hit by a lava bomb - a lump of molten rock - which flew out of Mount Etna.
The film also includes snippets of the La Palma volcano spewing out lava 32 hours after it erupted in 2021. Eighty days later he and the film crew went back to find the area decimated by molten rock and lava flows.
Chris and the camera crew also collected lava from volcanoes, “installed cutting-edge monitoring systems” and dived into vast craters with 4 x 200m ropes.
He told the ECHO: “It’s interesting the way life takes you, I’ve been pretty much on the road since the age of 21. I’ve been going into Volcanoes since the age of 23. Covid restarted the production as it took a financial cost, [we’ve made] an impressive series from it. We’ve filmed two of the episodes on Mount Etna in Italy.
“I started off as a joiner and now I’m climbing volcanoes for TV.”
Years ago on a separate mission, Chris was stranded on a crater for four days in Ambrym, Vanuatu. He endured cyclonic winds, and relentless acid rain and could only see 10 metres in front of him.
He added: “When I was younger I worked with 800 metres worth of ropes and put in some of the most extreme active volcanoes.
“The TV series has followed that [seven years ago]. I’m not a TV star, no I didn’t expect to be doing this.”
BBC Earth and Dave will broadcast Exploration Volcano at 6pm on June 5. Each episode is an hour long and the series will span eight weeks.
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