Mount Pinatubo, Philippines

Mount Pinatubo, Philippines

The volatile nature of volcanoes gives them the power to destroy, but also to create some of the most dramatic natural scenes of beauty available. Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, creating a caldera from the excess lava flow. The basin began to fill with water and the result is a turquoise volcanic lake, surrounded by the hands of Pinatubo.
Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano in the Cabusilan Mountains on the island of Luzon, near the tripoint of the Philippine provinces of Zambales, Tarlac, and Pampanga.

Mount Pinatubo's summit before the 1991 eruption was 1,745 m (5,725 ft) above sea level, only about 600 m (2,000 ft) above nearby plains, and only about 200 m (660 ft) 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 edge of the island of Luzon called the Zambales Mountains.

If Ancestral Pinatubo it was a lone peak, based on profile fitting to the reAncestral Pinatubo seems to have begun about 1.1 million years ago and probably ended tens of thousands 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 2,300 m (7,500 ft), 1,43 miles above sea level maining lower slopes, or lower if it had more than one peak.

The second-largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, and by far the largest eruption to affect a densely populated area, occurred at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines on June 15, 1991. The eruption produced high-speed avalanches of hot ash and gas, giant mudflows, and a cloud of volcanic ash hundreds of miles across

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