Last week, a 7-pointer earthquake that occurred off the coast of southern Kamchatka triggered an eruption at Sheveluch, near the Kkyuchevskoy Volcanic Group farther up the peninsula:
This layperson suspects that the seismic waves broke open the lava dome that Sheveluch had been building: BOOM!
Then (still just layperson speculation here) the uncapping of the conduit enabled a full eruption.
I don’t know whether anyone was hurt.
The event made me look up some more Kamchatka volcano videos for today.
There are many online, including:
1. A glamourous overview of this UNESCO geosite:
2. A state-produced video from some point before the 2012 eruption of Plosky Tolbachik. It is on a very human level; take some of it with a grain of salt, ignore the inaccuracies (volcanoes do not have epicenters, for instance), and it’s still fun because those people are not glamourous — they look like us and do what we would want do but wouldn’t because the hazardous areas are closed. which is a lot safer, but still…
Also, the bear. And the lunar rover animation surprise. And the campfire at sunset.
They also show brief excerpts from the Soviet-era film of Plosky Tolbachik’s subplinian eruption in the 1970s and some shots that I don’t think were in that film (it’s embedded in my recent post on Plosky Tolbachik).
I’ve also posted on Avachinsky and Koryaksy, and the threat they pose to nearby Petropavlosk (named after the Danish explorer Vitus Bering’s ships — “Peter” and “Paul”; he stopped in at the place during his hardy journeying to “discover” Alaska in the 1700s).
3. The Klyuchevskoy group.
We have already met Bezymianny and Klyuchevskoy, but hey, it’s Sunday morning and someone went to the trouble of making a three-hour-plus relaxation video of the whole area, so let’s close with that!
Featured image: kuhnmi, CC BY-SA 2.O. The photographer probably didn’t need a telephoto lens as he stood on a hill in the center of Petropavlosk — Koryaksy is only a few miles from the airport and it is a big volcano, as is nearby Avachinsky.
Flight To Wonder 