Man to spend 300 days alone on an island

French explorer and adventurer Xavier Rosset is about to embark on a 300 day trip to live alone on a remote tropical island in the South Pacific. His adventures will be filmed and used for a 52 minute documentary.

Tofua Caldera, in Tonga, is the summit caldera of a steep-sided composite cone that forms Tofua Island. Pre-caldera activity is recorded by a sequence of pyroclastic deposits and lavas constituting the older cone, followed on the northern part of the island by froth lavas or welded and unwelded ignimbrite. Following caldera collapse, lavas were erupted from the northern part of the island and the caldera-rim fissure zone, scoria and lavas from the caldera-wall fissure zones, pyroclastics and lavas from intracaldera cones, and recent pyroclastic fall deposits on the outer cone. Eruptive products are mainly basaltic andesites and andesites, plus occasional dacite flows within the older cone. A postcaldera cone with fumarolic activity (Lofia) is situated in the northern part of the caldera; a crater lake of unknown depth occupies most of the remainder.

Most historical eruptions have been small explosions from Lofia cone along the northern caldera rim. The eruptions of 1958-59 caused most of all islanders to evacuate for a year or more.