It only takes a few months for magma from the Earth's mantle to eat through layers of crust.
Scientists believe before the 1963 Irazú volcanic eruption, scalding magma travelled 22 miles to the volcano's magma chamber in only two months, LiveScience reported.
The researchers made their conclusion based on geothermal testing on ash from before the eruption and crystals.
"We refer to our story as the 'highway from hell,'" Phillip Ruprecht, lead study author and a volcanologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said.
The discovery suggests magma can move from the Earth's mantle to the surface in a matter of only months.
This research contradicts past models, which indicated magma would make a slow ascent to the top of the volcanic chamber spanning thousands of years.
"It's like going up a set of stairs. Each step is another change," Adam Kent, a geologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, said. "By the time you get to the surface, the magma has been changed quite substantially."
The new study pointed out the magma, in some cases, "skips the stairs" and moves quickly to the surface where it mixes with molten rock.
"This is telling us some interesting stuff about what's driving these volcanoes, which is hot stuff coming from deep within the mantle," Kent told LiveScience "The real proof of the pudding would be to find this behavior at many different places," he said.
Quick-moving magma could potentially allow researchers to predict future eruptions if they monitor the volcano at 10 feet deep.
The team is now analyzing olivine crystals from other arc volcanos in search of more examples of fast rising magma.
"It's clearly in every arc we've looked in. [But] in terms of an arc setting, I don't think every second volcano will have it. It will be fewer than that," Ruprecht said.
