Mount Pinatubo
is an active stratovolcano located on the island of Luzon in the
Philippines, at the intersection of the borders of the provinces
of Zambales, Tarlac, and Pampanga. Ancestral Pinatubo was a stratovolcano
made of andesite and dacite. Before 1991, the mountain was inconspicuous
and heavily eroded. It was covered in dense forest which supported
a population of several thousand indigenous people, the Aeta,
who had fled to the mountains from the lowlands when the Spanish
conquered the Philippines in 1565.
The volcano's eruption in June 1991 came after 635 years of dormancy,
and produced the largest and most violent terrestrial eruption
of the 20th century. Successful predictions of the onset of the
climactic eruption led to the evacuation of tens of thousands
of people from the surrounding areas, saving many lives, but as
the surrounding areas were severely damaged by pyroclastic flows,
ash deposits, and later, lahars caused by rainwater remobilising
earlier volcanic deposits, thousands of houses were destroyed. |
