Piercing a layer of clouds, the summit of Klyuchevskaya Volcano on the Russian Federation’s Kamchatka Peninsula released a faint plume in early June 2010. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image on June 7. A faint brown-gray plume blows toward the north (image right), contrasting with the bright clouds below. Debris flows—evidence of earlier volcanic activity—darken the volcano’s slopes.
Klyuchevskaya (or Kliuchevskoi) is a stratovolcano that reaches a height of 4,835 meters (15,863 feet). It is both the highest and most active volcano on Kamchatka. Klyuchevskaya’s 700-meter- (2,300-foot-) wide summit crater has been modified by numerous geologically recent eruptions, including eruptions recorded since the late seventeenth century.
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NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team and the United States Geological Survey. Caption by Michon Scott.
