Ah, the incandescent glow of a Hawaiian-style lava flow — its color, its heat, the way the snow sizzles and pops along its edges…
Wait. What?
Yes. In Siberia there is a Hawaiian-style volcano that goes off in fire fountains and red runny lava flows.
It’s called Plosky Tolbachik, but you won’t find anyone holding a luau-ски nearby.
This being Russia — specifically, its Far East region along the Pacific Ocean, nine time zones away from Moscow — our volcano has other, more terrifying moods that discourage most visitors.
Unfortunately for scientists and ardent volcano tourists (but luckily for local residents), Plosky Tolbachik is very remote.
It is part of UNESCO’s Volcanoes of Kamchatka World Heritage Centre, and the nearest village is almost 20 miles (30 km) away.
No lives have been lost at this volcano during recorded history, although its slow-moving lava sometimes does engulf UN property or scientific field camp structures.
A beautiful eruption, 2012-2013
Here is a 360° video, taken during Plosky Tolbachik’s most recent eruption.
It not only is a joy to watch but also clues us in on the volcano’s name:
From this helicopter, moving the view around, you can see rivers of red lava winding through a blackened lava flow field. There, too, is the snow that the molten rock is flowing over, through, and sometimes under.
What does lava flowing underneath snow look like?
Check out Figure 17 of this report by the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program (GVP) — a small but powerful jet of steam marks the path of that buried lava!
On that web page are also images of a fire curtain, a lava river, and other snow+Hawaiian lava wonders at this Kamchatkan volcano!
Getting back to our 360° video, when the pilot emerges from the steamy fog that’s above the lava flow, there, shining in bright sunlight, are a snow-covered pointy volcano on the left and, on the right, what appears to be a snowy white mesa rising behind the fiery black eruption vent that smokes and steams away a short distance downslope.
Bonus points for noticing that the pointy volcano and this mesa appear to be combined.
The first explorers here assumed it was all one fire mountain, naming it Tolbachik.
Scientists have since learned that these are actually two separate volcanoes, fused together (sort of like Kilauea and Mauna Loa are, in Hawaii).
The Russians call them Pointed (Ostroy) and Flat (Plosky) Tolbachik, and that gorgeous lava in the video is coming from the flank of our Sunday Morning Volcano — Plosky Tolbachik.
Ostroy Tolbachik appears sharp, but it’s actually extinct and is slowly eroding away.
Plosky Tolbachik is only flat-topped because there is a Hawaiian-style nested caldera at its summit, almost completely filled with hardened lava and then hidden by glacial ice (this is Siberia, after all).
Many of its eruptions — like this beautiful twenty-first century one — happen on the flanks.
Flank eruptions on Plosky Tolbachik occur in either of two Hawaiian-style rift-like areas that extend in more or less opposite directions from the summit.
Things occasionally do get hot at the summit, too.
For instance, there is a smaller pit crater up there that sometimes hosts lava lakes. It nestles up to the huge caldera wall sort of like how Kilauea Iki, which we visited in video last week, sits next to Kilauea’s enormous Halemau’mau summit caldera.
But here is the resemblance to Hawaiian volcanoes stops.
The eruption associated with this open summit pit on Plosky Tolbachik wasn’t a spectacle of fire fountaining like the lovely 1959 Kilauea Iki eruption that we looked at last episode.
It was a display of brute force that caught the attention of geoscientists around the world.
Fortunately, there is some video of it online, shared by Russian volcanologists.
A terrifying eruption, 1975-1976
Unless you know what you are looking at, this Soviet-era film — in Russian! — might seem off-putting, at least until we get to the gigantic fire jet.
It starts out with views of a small part of the almost 400 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of the Kamchatka Peninsula that Plosky Tolbachik covered with ash and other eruption products in 1975-1976.
Footage of the big lava jet — it’s no more a fountain than Niagara is! — appears shortly after the helicopter scenes, at around 0:48.
Belousov et al., in the source list, call that jet “ultra-strombolian” or “subplinian” (in coming episodes we’ll meet the namesake volcanoes for these scientific terms).
The Soviets captured some of the sound of Plosky Tolbachik’s huge lava jets, too. We also see volcanologists at work in the field, along with amazing shots that include:
- Phase 1: Intense fallout downwind from the lava jets.
- People in front of the jets (but not too close) for scale.
- Close-ups of some of the rocky bombs those jets threw miles away from the vent.
- Lab work! (And an assortment of Fifties to Seventies hair styles on some boffins.)
- Bubbling mud pots and hot springs in local rivers.
- Reminders of the area’s threatened agriculture and (I think) power plants.
- Photographs of especially explosive events (with some volcanic lightning), as well as of other volcanoes nearby.
- Lava on what might be snow and pretty lava fountains (perhaps in Phase 2).
To sum it all up, what happened there back in the 1970s apparently was this.
Churikova et al. report that a fissure broke open on the side of Plosky Tolbachik in early July 1975. Lava curtains danced for a while and eventually this first phase consolidated into one vent and that intense four-mile-high jet.
The volcano quieted down on July 27. Lava flowed there until August 9th, when another fissure opened up south of the first one and Phase 2 began: a fairly typical Hawaiian-style eruption, with long lava flows out into the countryside but away from settlements.
Plosky Tolbachik went back to sleep in late December 1976. However, an excited international volcanology community was now wide awake and had some questions about this formerly little known and unusually violent Hawaiian-style volcano — in Siberia.
What is Plosky Tolbachik and why is it there?
Hundreds of scientific papers have investigated this from various angles since the 1975-1976 eruption, which was Kamchatka’s biggest historic basalt eruption and the sixth largest one on record worldwide.
It’s still quite a puzzle.
Oddly enough, there actually is a Hawaiian connection of sorts, but it’s indirect and inexplicable.
The Hawaiian Islands formed over a hotspot, where a deep-rooted mantle plume pours out lava to construct all of the volcanoes there.
At the moment, Mauna Loa and Kilauea are the hotspot’s best customers, but they sit on the Pacific Ocean plate, which is slowly trundling them away from their lava source just as it has done with countless other volcanoes for more than eighty million years.
Nonavian dinosaurs walked the Earth when that hotspot made its debut!
Why isn’t there a huge fleet of Hawaiian Islands today?
As new islands have formed over the hotspot, the older ones — deprived of mantle plume heat and inflow — have subsided and gradually have lost their volcanic identity.
Wind and water wear them down, first into atolls and then into submarine piles of basalt known as seamounts. These ride the Pacific ocean plate as it moves along and eventually follow it down into Earth’s interior at a subduction zone.
Guess where that subduction zone is.
Yes, some of this oceanic plate subducts under Alaska, with its Aleutian Island volcanic arc.
But geologists have traced ALL known remaining Hawaiian structures across the northern Pacific until the ocean plate disappears into the subduction zone under Kamchatka — where there are many fire mountains exhibiting all the expected forms of explosive subduction-zone volcanism.
And there is this one odd-ball, Plosky Tobachik, wearing a Hawaiian shirt but occasionally growling like a Russian bear.
It’s not what you think, but what is it?
Unfortunately, Nature isn’t simple. It can never be the case that ancient Hawaiian lava goes down the Kamchatka trench and erupts again at Plosky Tolbachik.
For complex geological reasons (which you can explore in the sources quoted in this episode, if you like), every volcano in the group that our Sunday Morning Volcano belongs to has unique characteristics that challenge some of the best minds on our planet to explain.
Plosky Tolbachik takes this to extremes. So we can’t wrap up this episode neatly with answers.
We now can share a little of the wonder and excitement that experts must have felt when this Siberian volcano first opened up and roared out a big “Aloha!” at the world in July 1975.
Monitoring:
Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT).
More Information:
Global Volcanism Program: Tolbachik.
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Sources include:
In addition to multiple Google-translated pages at the KVERT site:
Belousov, A.; Belousova, M.; Edwards, B.; Volynets, A.; and Melnikov, D. 2015. Overview of the precursors and dynamics of the 2012–13 basaltic fissure eruption of Tolbachik Volcano, Kamchatka, Russia. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 307: 22-37.
Churikova, T. G.; Gordeychik, B. N.; Edwards, B. R.; Ponomareva, V. V.; and Zelenin, E. A. 2015. The Tolbachik volcanic massif: A review of the petrology, volcanology and eruption history prior to the 2012–2013 eruption. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 307: 3-21.
Oregon State University. 2024. Volcano World: Rift zones. https://volcano.oregonstate.edu/rift-zones Accessed January 17, 2024.
UNESCO. 2024. Volcanoes of Kamchatka. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/765/
Flight To Wonder 