Covered in trees, it was known as ‘El Chichón’, the Spanish slang word for a small bump. El Chichón, by contrast, caught everybody by surprise, with three separate explosive phases. Church in the village of Naranjo, located about 8 km south of El Chichón, 2 June 1982. Photograph by Wendell Duffield/CC-BY-NC-NDThe author above the El Chichón crater in 2006. In the case of the El Chichón eruption, the problem arose from the asymmetry of cooling: far more in the northern hemisphere (the site of the eruption) compared with the southern hemisphere.