I have a sneaking suspicion it's another one of those cognitive biases - get off a boat onto land and you feel safer. even if the boat will still be floating years after the land is.

You would be a fool to try the match trick in your apartment, but on an island? we just don't have that much experience of the earth blowing up around us.

then again the group of people who are first onto a volcanic island that popped out of the sea are a pretty self selecting bunch of foolhardy idiots :-)

The ground doesn't have to explode for a gaseous fireball to envelop you.

to be fair, neither has happened to me often enough to make it something I worry about.

Reminds me of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derweze

Or this, near Cirali in Turkey. Quite interesting to visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimaera_(geography)

Something about that whole situation seems fishy.

Safety Third

Sadly, I remember far too many old quotes from very bad movies.

From the 1974 movie, Flesh Gordon.

[after stepping off the space ship and taking a deep breath]

Dr. Flexi Jerkoff: Good, there's oxygen on this planet.

> Yes, this is what I always do when I encounter dead fish and an unknown source of hissing gas: light it with a match.

Makes me think of Beavis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkEN_wB2A4

What I'd like to see is that the locals could advantage of it and setup a natural gas mining operation, because they may have found a large pocket of it.