If you wanted to stare into the fires of Mount Doom, you’d be disappointed. The real-world stand-in for The Lord of the Rings‘ ominous mountain is actually New Zealand’s Mount Ngauruhoe, and it last erupted in 1974. No, if you want fire and smoke and lava, you head to Hawaii.

In the video below (available to play in 4K), “Kilauea – The Fire Within” gorgeously depicts just some of the activity of a volcano that has been erupting continuously since January 1983. There really is no other place on Earth, Middle or otherwise, where you can watch lava creep over forest brush and bubble inside a red-hot cauldron like this.

Director Lance Page of Page Films described the scene as such:

“This six and a half minute film is my best attempt at capturing what it felt like to witness molten rock slowly burning down a dense wet rainforest or to peer into a six-hundred-foot-wide lava lake at Kilauea’s summit crater. I’ve never been anywhere else on the planet that demanded as much respect and awareness for the natural environment around me.”

If you were going to forge a ring anywhere, naturally it would be in the Ring of Fire. [Aside: If the One Ring was forged from 24k pure gold, the temperature of Kilauea’s lava would be just hot enough to destroy it, because science.]

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IMAGES: Page Films