Smithsonian.com

This photo, of Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano in 1996, is one of 50,000 made freely available this week by the British Geological Survey via their new web service OpenGeoscience. The 1000 x 1000 pixel images, from the BGS’s National Archive of Digital Photographs, are free to download for non-commercial use and cover a range of topics, from earthquakes to landscapes to fossils. Some date back as far as the late 1800s, and others were taken as far away from British soil as Antarctica.

Included in the web service are the release of geological maps for the whole of the United Kingdom (the BGS started making these maps 175 years ago) and a host of geological datasets, including groundwater chemistry and borehole samples.

For more volcano photos, check out our photo essay of amazing shots from photographer Bernhard Edmaier

(Image credit: BGS NERC)