The Great Tolbachik Fissure Eruption: Geological and Geophysical Data 1975–1976

Abstract

In this decade, the devastating eruptions of Mount St. Helens in May 1980 and of El Chichón (Mexico) in March–April 1982, along with recurring signs of possible precursory activity at Long Valley caldera (California), have greatly increased public as well as scientific awareness of volcanic phenomena. Yet, even though the Great Tolbachik Fissure Eruption (GTFE) in 1975–1976 was larger than any in the world thus far in the 1980s, it received scant notice outside the USSR because of its remote location in the Kamchatka Peninsula (off limits to westerners) and because initial reports of it were almost exclusively in Russian. This new book, edited by Fedotov and Markhinin, now makes available to the western world information regarding the GTFE, the biggest volcanic event in the 1970s. Moreover, it was the largest basalt eruption in the Kurile‐Kamchatka arc in recorded history and, on a global basis, the most voluminous outpouring of basalt since the 1783 Laki fissure eruption in Iceland.