Atlasov Island

About

Atlasov Island (sometimes rendered as Atlasova Island, from), also known as Alaid Island (Hepburn: Araido-tō), is the northernmost island of the Kuril Islands, part of the Sakhalin Oblast in Russia. Located on the island is Alaid volcano, the highest volcano of the Kurils and one of the most active. The island is named after Vladimir Atlasov, a 17th-century Russian explorer who incorporated the nearby Kamchatka Peninsula into Russia. It is essentially the cone of the submarine volcano Vulkan Alaid protruding above the Sea of Okhotsk to a height of 2,285 metres (7, 497 feet). The island has an area of 119 square kilometres (46 square miles), and is currently uninhabited. Numerous pyroclastic cones dot the lower flanks of basaltic to basaltic andesite volcano, particularly on the NW and SE sides, including an offshore cone formed during the 1933–34 eruption. Its near perfect shape gave rise to many legends about the volcano among the peoples of the region, such as the Itelmens and Kuril Ainu. The Russian scientist Stepan Krasheninnikov was told the story that it was once a mountain in Kamchatka, but the neighbouring mountains became jealous of its beauty and exiled it to the sea, leaving behind Kurile Lake in southern Kamchatka. Geographically, this story is not without evidence, as after the last Ice Age most of the icecaps melted, raising the

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.