N.J. has a volcano! Everything you need to know about what’s hiding beneath this hill.

An earlier version of this story was published in 2024.

It looks like just another hill in Sussex County, but you wouldn’t have wanted to have been standing there 420 million years ago.

That’s about when the Beemerville Volcano erupted in Wantage, give or take 6 million years, according to geologists.

So much about New Jersey is familiar — the Jersey Shore , traffic jug handles, diners. Far less known is there was a time, nearly 200 million years before dinosaurs first roamed the Earth , when a volcanic eruption reshaped the landscape.

“You don’t typically think of New Jersey as volcanoes. We’re not Iceland, we’re not Hawaii. But we do have a very unique geologic history,” said Steve Domber, New Jersey’s state geologist.

The crater is long gone. All that remains of the Beemerville