The Kamchatkan Volcanic Eruption Response Team has reported a series of explosive eruptions on Mount Ebako, a 1156 m volcano on the northern end of Paramushir Island in the Kuril Archipelago in the Russian Far East, on 4-5 and 10 September 2020. These produced a series of ash columns that reached up to 3.5 km above sealevel, and drifted to the east and southeast.
The Kuril Archipelago runs from the northwestern tip of Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamtchatka Peninsula. It marks the southern margin of the Okhotsk Plate, which underlies the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin Island and Tōhoku and Hokkaidō in Japan. Along this southern margin the Pacific Plate is being subducted beneath the Okhotsk Plate in the Kuril Trench. As the Pacific Plate sinks under the Okhotsk Plate it is partial melted by the resultant friction and the heat of the Earth's interior. Some of the melted material then rises up through the overlying Okhotsk Plate as magma, fuelling the volcanoes of the Kuril Archipelago.
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