In the 1997 drama, Dante's Peak, Pierce Brosnan arrives in a town only to discover that the long dormant volcano may wake up at any moment.

Of course, the hero and his family survive, and the volcano ceases erupting.

But a podcast by Flash Forward suggested that if the 1,500 potentially active volcanoes worldwide really did all erupt at the same time, it could lead to a devastating doomsday scenario.

A massive volcanic plume is seen as Mount Etna erupts. Explosions and ash emissions were seen from Mount Etna's Voragine crater in what was the first eruptive activity from the crater since 2013

The Earth currently has 1,500 'active volcanoes' - meaning they have had at least one eruption during the past 10,000 years.

This is aside from the continuous belt of volcanoes on the ocean floor, about 500 of which have erupted in historical time.

However, not all eruptions are the same.

Dr Matthew Watson, a volcano specialist from the University of Bristol told MailOnline: 'You can broadly categorise eruptions into two different types.

'The first, effusive, produces lava flows and lots of gas. The second, explosive, produces ash and gas.

'The difference in activity is controlled mostly by the viscosity of the magma.

'The more viscous the magma, the more difficult it is to get gas out of the system and the more likely you are to have an explosion.'

Despite the type of eruptions differing massively, if all the world's volcanoes erupted at the same time, the results would be catastrophic in a number of ways.