Raikoke Volcano, located on the Kuril Islands of Russia, south of the volcanically active Kamchatka Peninsula, erupted last weekend for the first time in 95-years, and astronauts aboard the ISS captured this incredible image. You can see a large plume of ash and volcanic gases shooting up from the stratovolcano’s 2,300-foot-wide crater, which eventually streamed eastward, as it was pulled into a storm system over the North Pacific Ocean. Read more for a video and additional information.
“The ring of white puffy clouds at the base of the column might be a sign of ambient air being drawn into the column and the condensation of water vapor. Or it could be a rising plume from interaction between magma and seawater because Raikoke is a small island and flows likely entered the water,” said Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech, to NASA Earth Observatory.