Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard reports on Popocatépetl, Mexico's largest active volcano, which may have a major eruption within the next 100 years near some heavily populated areas.

• What can organizations do to help the public prepare for potential disasters, such as this one? Which resiliency measures would be the most effective?

• Here's how to support the world’s most urgent and underfunded crises.

On the clear-sky morning of December 21st, 1994, Claus Siebe was standing at the foot of Popocatépetl, watching as elephantine plumes of black smoke and heaps of pyroclastic flow spewed out of Mexico's largest active volcano. Siebe stood silently next to a group of mountaineers, all of whom had their heads cocked upward. He'd never witnessed an eruption on this scale before; he was floored. Recalling that day now, nearly 24 years later, Siebe describes a scene of awe and confusion. "Everybody was watching," Siebe says. "Nobody panicked. We were all just kind of surprised that this was happening."

For weeks leading up to the eruption, Siebe, a professor of volcanology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, had been busy reconstructing the eruptive history of Popocatépetl, a volcano that sits between Mexico City and Puebla and their collective 20 million people. Performing geological and gas measurements, Siebe and his team of researchers concluded that Popocatépetl (which translates to "Smoking Mountain" in the Nahuatl language) was now "reactivating." Four days before Christmas of that year, their hunch was proven correct.

Over the next five years, Siebe and his colleagues would deduce that Popocatépetl's latest activity was its first in almost 1,000 years ... He and his team are certain that the question isn't if Latin America's deadliest volcano is going to have another Big One. It's when.

Read the full article about the danger of Mexico's deadliest volcano by Mark Oprea at Pacific Standard.