Mount Shiveluch, a 3283 m high stratovolcano (cone shaped volcano made up of layers of ash and lava)on the eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, underwent a major eruption on Tuesday 11 April 2023, producing an ash column about 20 km high, and ash falls over an area of about 108 000 km². The event is not thought to have led to any fatalities, but has caused significant disruption to air traffic, as well as blocking roads on the ground, and contaminating water supplies in some areas.
Fallen ash blocking a street in the village of Klyuchi on the Kamchatka Peninsula following an eruption on Mount Shiveluch on 11 April 2023. Yury Demyanchuk/Volcanology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences/AP.
Shiveluch is the northernmost of 30 active volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and is a member of the Kliuchevskaya Volcano Group, in the central part of the peninsula. The volcano is thought to have begun erupting between 60 000 and 70 000 years ago, and to have undergone about 60 significant eruptive episodes during the Holocene Epoch, with particularly notable episodes between 6500 and 6400 BC, between 2250 and 2000 BC, and between 50 and 650 AD. The current eruptive episode is thought ti have begun around 900 AD.
The Kamchatka Peninsula lies on the eastern edge of the Okhotsk Plate, close to its margin with the Pacific and North American Plates. The Pacific Plate is being subducted along the margin, and as it does so it passes under the southern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and as it does so is partially melted by the friction and the heat of the Earth's interior. Some of the melted material then rises through the overlying Okhotsk Plate as magma and fueling the volcanoes of southern Kamchatka.
Simple diagram showing the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Okhotsk Plate along the Kuril Kamchatka Trench. The Kamchatka Peninsula is at the top of the diagram. Auburn University.
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