Mount Pinatubo
Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano in the Zambales Mountains in Luzon in the Philippines. Located on the tripoint of Zambales, Tarlac and Pampanga provinces, most people were unaware of its eruptive history before the pre-eruption volcanic activity in early 1991. Dense forests, which supported a population of several thousand indigenous Aetas, heavily eroded and obscured Pinatubo.
Pinatubo is known for its VEI-6 eruption on June 15, 1991, the second-largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century after the 1912 eruption of Novarupta in Alaska. The eruption coincided with Typhoon Yunya making landfall in the Philippines, which brought a dangerous mix of ash and rain to nearby towns and cities. Early predictions led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, saving many lives. The eruption severely damaged surrounding areas with pyroclastic surges, pyroclastic falls, and later, flooding lahars caused by rainwater re-mobilizing volcanic deposits. This destruction affected infrastructure and altered river systems for years. Minor dome-forming eruptions inside the caldera continued from 1992 to 1993.
The 1991 eruption had worldwide effects. It released roughly or of magma, bringing large amounts of minerals and toxic metals to the surface. It also released of. It ejected more particulate into the stratosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. In the following months, aerosols formed a global layer of sulfuric acid haze. Global temperatures dropped by about in the years 1991–1993, and ozone depletion temporarily increased significantly.
Geography
The volcano is about northwest of Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Near Mount Pinatubo are former military bases that were maintained by the United States. The U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay was south of Pinatubo, and the extent of Clark Air Base was just east of the volcano's summit. The volcano is near to about 6 million people.History
Even before the 1991 eruption, Mount Pinatubo had little topographic prominence: it was above sea level, only about above nearby plains, and only about higher than surrounding peaks, which largely obscured it from view. It is part of a chain of volcanoes which lie along the western side of the island of Luzon called the Zambales Mountains.Pinatubo belongs to the Cabusilan sub-range of the Zambales Mountains, which consists of Mount Cuadrado, Mount Negron, Mount Mataba and Mount Pinatubo. They are subduction volcanoes, formed by the Eurasian plate sliding under the Philippine Mobile Belt along the Manila Trench to the west. Mount Pinatubo and the other volcanoes on this volcanic belt arise due to magmatic occlusion from this subduction plate boundary.
Pinatubo is flanked on the west by the Zambales Ophiolite Complex, which is an easterly-dipping section of Eocene oceanic crust uplifted during the late Oligocene. The Tarlac Formation north, east and southeast of Pinatubo consists of marine, nonmarine and volcanoclastic sediments formed in the late Miocene and Pliocene.
The most recent study of Mount Pinatubo before the activities of 1991 was the overall geological study in 1983 and 1984 made by F. G. Delfin for the Philippine National Oil Company as part of the surface investigations of the area before exploratory drilling and well testing for geothermal energy sources in 1988 to 1990. He recognized two life histories of the mountain, which he classified as "ancestral" and "modern" Pinatubo.
Ancestral Pinatubo
Activity of Ancestral Pinatubo seems to have begun about 1.1 million years ago and probably ended tens of thousands of years or more before the birth of "modern" Pinatubo. Much of the rugged land around the present volcano consists of remnants of "ancestral" Pinatubo. It was an andesite and dacite stratovolcano whose eruptive activity was much less explosive than modern Pinatubo. Its center was roughly where the current volcano is. The projected height of the mountain is up to, or 1.43 miles above sea level if it were a lone peak, based on a profile fitting to the remaining lower slopes, or lower if it had more than one peak.The old volcano is exposed in the walls of an old wide caldera, referred to as Tayawan Caldera by Delfin. Some of the nearby peaks are the remnants of ancestral Pinatubo, left behind when the softer parts of the old mountain slopes were eroded by weathering. Ancestral Pinatubo is a somma volcano with modern Pinatubo as the new cone.
Mount Dorst, to the east, is part of the dip slope of the ancestral Pinatubo. Several mountains near modern Pinatubo are old satellite vents of ancestral Pinatubo, forming volcanic plugs and lava domes. These satellite vents were probably active around the same time as the ancestral volcano and include the domes of Mount Negron, Mount Cuadrado, Mount Mataba and the Bituin and Tapungho plugs.
Modern Pinatubo
- : After a long period of dormancy, Modern Pinatubo was born in Ancestral Pinatubo's cataclysmic and most explosive eruptions, estimated to be five times larger than the June 1991 eruption. It deposited all around the volcano up to of pyroclastic surge material up to thick. The total volume of volcanic material ejected during the eruptions is unknown. The removal of so much material from the underlying magma chamber resulted in the Tayawan caldera. The violent eruptive period started by the eruption is referred to by Delfin as the Inararo Eruptive Period, named after a village that was destroyed in the 1991 eruption.
- c. 15,000 BC
- c. 7000 BC. Its eruptions were as energetic, if not as voluminous as the Inararo eruptions.
- c. 4000–3000 BC. This and the Mara-unot period's eruptions were smaller than the Inararo eruptions but about two to three times as big as that of 1991 based on the pyroclastic flow runout distances and depths of valley filling.
- c. 1900–300 BC
- c. AD 1500. Its eruptions were roughly the same size as those of 1991.
The maximum size of eruptions in each eruptive period though has been getting smaller through the more than 35,000-year history of modern Pinatubo, but this might be an artifact of erosion and burial of older deposits. The oldest eruption of modern Pinatubo, Inararo, was also its largest.
The 1991 eruption was among the smallest documented in its geologic record.
The volcano has never grown very large between eruptions, because it produces mostly unwelded, easily erodible deposits and periodically destroys the viscous domes that fill its vents. After the Buag eruption, the volcano lay dormant, its slopes becoming completely covered in dense rainforest and eroded into gullies and ravines. The c. 500-year repose though between the Buag and present eruptive periods is among the shorter repose periods recognized in its geologic history.
1991 eruption
A small blast at 03:41 PST on June 12 marked the beginning of a new, more violent phase of the eruption. A few hours later the same day, massive blasts lasting about half an hour generated big eruption columns, which quickly reached heights of over and which generated large pyroclastic surges extending up to from the summit in some river valleys. Fourteen hours later, a 15-minute blast hurled volcanic matter to heights of. Friction in the up-rushing ash column generated abundant volcanic lightning.In March and April 1991, magma rising toward the surface from more than beneath Pinatubo triggered small volcano tectonic earthquakes and caused powerful steam explosions that blasted three craters on the north flank of the volcano. Thousands of small earthquakes occurred beneath Pinatubo through April, May and early June and many thousand of tons of noxious sulfur dioxide gas were also emitted by the volcano.
From June 7 to 12, the first magma reached the surface of Mount Pinatubo. Because it had lost most of the gas contained in it on the way to the surface, the magma oozed out to form a lava dome but did not cause an explosive eruption. However, on June 12, millions of cubic yards of gas-charged magma reached the surface and exploded in the reawakening volcano's first spectacular eruption.
When even more highly gas-charged magma reached Pinatubo's surface on June 15, the volcano exploded in a cataclysmic eruption that ejected more than of material. The ash cloud from this climactic eruption rose into the atmosphere. At lower altitudes, the volcanic ash was blown in all directions by the intense cyclonic winds of a coincidentally occurring typhoon, and winds at higher altitudes blew the ash southwestward. A blanket of ash and larger pumice lapilli blanketed the countryside. Fine ash fell as far away as the Indian Ocean and satellites tracked the ash cloud several times around the globe.
Huge pyroclastic flows roared down the flanks of Mount Pinatubo, filling once-deep valleys with fresh volcanic deposits as much as thick. The eruption removed so much magma and rock from below the volcano that the summit collapsed to form a wide caldera.
Following the climactic eruption of June 15, 1991, activity at the volcano continued at a much lower level, with continuous ash eruptions lasting until August 1991 and episodic eruptions continuing for another month.