Kurile Lake
Interesting facts
- Ash from the eruption that created the lake has been identified as far away as Greenland, and the ash fall covered over two million square kilometres.
- A millimetre-thick layer of the same ash lies in the upper Indigirka River valley, some 1,700 km from the lake.
- Two sulfate spikes in a Greenland ice core, dated to around 6470 and 6476 BC, may be fingerprints of the Kurile Lake eruption.
- The eruption is estimated to have released 26–29 million tonnes of sulfur and 43–49 million tonnes of chlorine, comparable to Tambora in 1815.
- Its pyroclastic flows swept across southern Kamchatka to reach both the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk, piling up deposits as much as 150 metres thick near the lake.
- Gravity surveys suggest a magma chamber about 10 km wide still lies roughly 4 km beneath the lake.
- Eroded pumice formations near the lake, shaped like upturned boats, were named Khutk's boats by native settlers.
- On average, water stays in the lake for about eighteen years before draining out through the Ozernaya River.
- Old shorelines show the lake once stood up to 50 metres higher than today, possibly because lava flows dammed its outlet.
- A midge, Chaetocladius tatianae, is found nowhere in the world except the Kurile Lake watershed.
Why it is worth it
Kurile Lake fills a volcanic caldera in the far south of Kamchatka, and it looks exactly like what it is: a deep blue basin ringed by volcanoes, with Ilyinsky volcano, whose lava flows reach into the water, the jagged ridge of Diky Greben on the shore and green islands scattered across the surface. The lake covers about 77 square kilometres and reaches 316 metres deep; because its surface lies only 81 metres above the sea, its floor lies far below sea level.
The basin was made by one of the largest eruptions of the last ten thousand years. Around 6440 BC a catastrophic eruption expelled some 140 to 170 cubic kilometres of material — comparable to Tambora in 1815 — and collapsed the ground into a caldera; its ash fell as far away as Magadan, about 1,000 km distant. Volcanoes have grown around it since: Ilyinsky last erupted in 1911. The rock island in the middle known as the Heart of Alaid is a lava dome about 300 metres high. Local legend explains it differently: the volcano Alaid, driven out of Kamchatka by its jealous neighbours, tore out its stone heart and left it in the lake before walking into the sea, where it now stands as an island.
The lake's fame today is living. It is the largest sockeye salmon nursery in Asia: millions of fish run up the Ozernaya River every summer to spawn in its tributaries, and a fisheries research station on the western shore counts them. The salmon draw one of the densest gatherings of brown bears in Russia; several hundred can line the shores and streams in late summer, fishing in plain view. The lake lies within the South Kamchatka federal reserve, part of the Volcanoes of Kamchatka World Heritage site.
Getting there
Kurile Lake lies in a roadless part of southern Kamchatka, about 187 km in a straight line from Vilyuchinsk and some 210 km from Yelizovo Airport (PKC), which serves Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Visitors almost always come on helicopter excursions from the Petropavlovsk area, access is regulated because the lake is inside a protected reserve.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kurile Lake is a caldera and crater lake in Kamchatka, Russia. It is also known as Kurilskoye Lake or Kuril Lake. It is part of the Eastern Volcanic Zone of Kamchatka which, together with the Sredinny Range, forms one of the volcanic belts of Kamchatka. These volcanoes form from the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Okhotsk Plate and the Asian Plate.
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