by Jason Smith

ogsled, snowmobile, or chartered helicopter—if you want to get around Kamchatka during winter, those are your options. Kamchatka Peninsula, which curves down from the Russian mainland like a broad cutlass, is flanked to the west by the Sea of Okhotsk. To the east is the Bering Sea, then the gentle arc of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. "Remote" doesn’t begin to describe Kamchatka. It’s nine time zones from Moscow—Russians call it the caboose—and though it’s close in size to California, only 400,000 people hang their hats there.

Maybe that’s for the best. Kamchatka is literally bursting with active volcanoes, including Kluchevskoi, the largest active volcano in Eurasia and one of the largest in the world, and Karymsky, which has been erupting reliably for the past five years.

It’s a volcanologist’s dream. When Jonathan Lees first visited Kamchatka in 1996, his Russian colleagues took him up in a helicopter for a bird’s-eye view of Karymsky volcano. Lees, associate professor of geological sciences, didn’t know at the time that Karymsky was active.

"As the helicopter swung around," Lees says, "this explosion came right up in our faces. I’d never seen that before, and I thought it was pretty cool. When I say ‘pretty cool,’ I mean that our mouths were open, and our eyes were popping out of our heads."

So Lees set up an array of seismic instruments on Kamchatka. What he found might change the way scientists think about the Earth’s crust.

 

Next: "The mantle starts to boil..."

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