Climbing Mount Karangetang Volcano In Siau, Sulawesi
Mount Karangetang is an awesome Jurassic Park-looking volcano that dominates the remote island of Siau in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
You can’t go anywhere on tiny Siau island without seeing this majestic volcano and its twin smoking craters. If you’re lucky, you may even get to see it spouting molten lava and rock bombs at night, which it does pretty often.
In this guide, I’ll share my experience hiking the Karangetang volcano in 2021, and I’ll give some tips in case you plan to climb it yourself.
First of all, let’s talk about safety. Karangetang is a highly active volcano — probably one of the most active volcanoes in the world.
The local guides are knowledgeable and any seismic activity is monitored by the Indonesian government, but there’s still plenty of risk involved in climbing this mountain. It may erupt at any time.
You can climb to the top of Karangetang if you’re feeling extra crazy, but to be safe most people only hike partway up this mountain and peep at the smoking craters from a distance (and even that is a bit risky).
Climbing any active volcano carries some danger obviously, but this one is unusually active, so proceed at your own risk.
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From Wikipedia:
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. The process that forms volcanoes is called volcanism.
On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging, and because most of Earth's plate boundaries are underwater, most volcanoes are found underwater. For example, a mid-ocean ridge, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates whereas the Pacific Ring of Fire has volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates.
Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the crust's plates, such as in the East African Rift, the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field, and the Rio Grande rift in North America. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has been postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs from the core–mantle boundary, 3,000 kilometers (1,900 mi) deep within Earth. This results in hotspot volcanism, of which the Hawaiian hotspot is an example. Volcanoes are usually not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another.
Large eruptions can affect atmospheric temperature as ash and droplets of sulfuric acid obscure the Sun and cool Earth's troposphere. Historically, large volcanic eruptions have been followed by volcanic winters which have caused catastrophic famines.
Other planets besides Earth have volcanoes. For example, volcanoes are very numerous on Venus. In 2009, a paper was published suggesting a new definition for the word 'volcano' that includes processes such as cryovolcanism. It suggested that a volcano be defined as 'an opening on a planet or moon's surface from which magma, as defined for that body, and/or magmatic gas is erupted.'