Mutnovsky
Interesting facts
- In April 2009 the Russian BASE jumper Valery Rozov parachuted into Mutnovsky's crater.
- In June 2018 volcanologists found a lake inside the Active Funnel for the first time since studies of the volcano began, a sign of a new stage in its activity.
- Mutnovsky has erupted at least 16 times in recorded history, including about ten eruptions of varying strength in the twentieth century.
- Its two main craters are each about two kilometres across and up to 400 metres deep, and the southwestern one is filled by a glacier.
- A fumarole temperature of 540 °C was recorded on the volcano in 1983.
- One of its mud pots, known as the Black Cauldron, holds strongly acidic water.
- The volcano's main caldera measures roughly 3.5 kilometres across, while a crater named Starshy, meaning Senior, is about 320 metres wide.
- The Vulkannaya River, born from melting glaciers and snowfields on the volcano, carries dissolved minerals and acids from the crater.
Why it is worth it
Mutnovsky is a volcano you can walk into. In the south of the Kamchatka Peninsula, a massif built of four merged cones holds craters about two kilometres across and hundreds of metres deep, filled with glacier ice on one side and roaring fumaroles on the other. Steam and gas from the main vent, known as the Active Funnel, can rise as a column up to a kilometre high, and fumarole temperatures there have been measured at over 500 °C.
The activity is concentrated in the northwestern part of the massif, where two overlapping craters form a figure-of-eight about 2 km across and up to 600 metres deep. Mutnovsky has erupted many times in recorded history; its largest known eruption was in 1848, and an explosion in 2000, driven by hot gas underground, blasted out a new crater about 200 metres wide. It is also one of the largest geothermal fields in the world. Around the craters are boiling mud pots in different colours, acid pools and ice caves hollowed out where volcanic heat meets glacier ice. Meltwater gathers into the Vulkannaya River, which cuts the narrow Opasny ("Dangerous") canyon and plunges over an 80-metre waterfall.
At the northern foot of the volcano lie the Dachny hot springs, sometimes called the Lesser Valley of Geysers, though they are an active fumarole field where hot gases bubble up through a cold stream rather than true geysers. The heat underground is put to use by the Mutnovsky geothermal power plant on the northeastern side of the massif, with a capacity of around 60 MW. In 2020 the caldera became part of the South Kamchatka Nature Park.
The volcano rises to 2,322 metres, about 75 to 80 kilometres south of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the regional capital, with neighbouring Gorely volcano close by.
Getting there
The nearest town is Vilyuchinsk, about 55 km away. The nearest airport is Yelizovo Airport (PKC), serving Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, about 82 km away. The crater area is reached by off-road vehicle from the Opasny canyon area, a journey of several hours.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mutnovsky is an active complex volcano located in the southern part of Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, approximately 75-80 km south of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The volcano is formed from several cones and lava flows from flank eruptions that have merged into a single massif.
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