Mount Taranaki is an unusually symmetrical volcano in New Zealand whose conical prominence is heightened by the circular national park that it is centered in, where forest ends and farmland begins. Tom Scott visited and shot this 3-minute mini-documentary about it and its geologically imminent doom.
Mount Taranaki, on the North Island of New Zealand, is a large-scale circle that's visible from space: a stratovolcano with six miles of forest around it. But that didn't happen naturally. Oh, and there's a good chance that, in the next fifty years or so, it might explode.
Aerial photos often use angles that obscure the places where the unmanaged forest extends beyond the circle, to make it all the more perfect and uncanny—the one used to card the video embedded above is particularly well-composed because clouds conceal the most prominent of them.
I prefer to see all the details, though, because the result makes me think less of a circle and more of a fractal. Behold Mount Mandelbrot!
