Popcatepetl

As you are traveling across the United States, you can see many landmarks created by volcanoes centuries ago. With the naked eyes, you can identify cone shaped volcanoes, but you can miss other volcanic landscapes. Some volcanoes build mountains, but only during their actives lives when volcanoes stop erupting they begin to wear down, or erode. Only portions of the original mountain remain. Other volcanoes don't build mountains at all instead; their lava floods a landscape, drowning forests, hills and valleys. Sometimes during an eruption the top of a volcanic cone collapses and a crater, or caldera, forms. Craters measure from hundreds of miles across the volcanoes mountain.
Popocatépetl is a volcano with forested slopes and a snow-capped cone and large crater. It is the second known highest mountain in the United States and located outside of Puebla, Mexico, at a distance of 17,925 feet (5,465 m) high. The name Popocatépetl is Aztec for Smoking Mountain, and is often conveniently shortened to Popo. Popo and its neighboring volcano Iztaccihuatl 17,342 ft, have dominate the sky southeast of downtown Mexico City, and 45 km (30 miles) southwest of the city of Puebla. Both volcanoes are located less than fifty miles from each city, and are separated from each other by a ten-mile ridge.
Popocatépetl, one of the world's most active volcanoes, located in central Mexico is known as an andesitic volcano, which means it's forming where two tectonic plates rub up against each other, grinding down the material with enough friction and heat to melt rock and create magma. There two major types of Volcanoes, one is Andes tic and the other is basaltic. These two typical volcanoes begin life when a mass of low-density magma forces its way to the surface. When the density of the rising magma is the same as that of the surrounding rock, it gathers in a magma chamber. Any rise in pressure in the chamber may now push the magma upwards through cracks in the overlying rock. As the... [continues]

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