Highly active Russian volcano plays peek-a-boo with an astronaut
2, 2019 This eye-catching astronaut photo shows a towering, highly active Russian volcano poking its head above a thick bank of swirling clouds over the Kuril Islands.
Key points
- Explosive 'Mountain of God' looms A 2020 astronaut photo shows the unique structure of Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active stratovolcano in Tanzania that was recently adorned with a bright white "ash cone." The explosive peak produces a rare type of lava that is unusually cool but travels remarkably quickly.
- During this outburst, the volcano also spit out smoke and ash that was spotted from space alongside another eruption plume coming from the nearby island Paramushir.
- Millions of years ago, this larger volcano was likely connected to the Kamchatka Peninsula via a land bridge that has since been submerged.
(The volcano was not erupting when the photo was taken.) Farther down the volcano's flanks are a series of snow-filled gullies carved out by lava flows from previous eruptions.
See more Earth from space World's highest frozen lake shatters A 2024 astronaut photo shows the icy surface of Pangong Lake breaking apart in the lofty Tibetan Plateau.
Additional details
- The island consists mainly of a single, massive volcano, called Alaid, which is known for its near-perfect cone shape.
- Alaid is essentially the summit of a much larger underwater volcano that lies beneath the Sea of Okhotsk.
- The lofty peak is located on Atlasov Island, the northernmost of the Kuril Islands — a chain of roughly 50 largely uninhabited volcanic landmasses stretching along a fault line that runs between Russia and Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk.
- Alaid has erupted at least nine times in the past 50 years, including a major outburst in April 1981 that ejected a 1,250-mile-long (2,000 km) plume of thick smoke and ash into the atmosphere, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.
- The area surrounding a cluster of parasitic cones on the volcano's northwest flank (top right in the photo) is devoid of vegetation — a result of another major eruption in 1972, which scoured the surrounding landscape with hot ash.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.