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Piton de la Fournaise (French: "Peak of the Furnace") is a shield volcano on the eastern side of Réunion island (a French territory) in the Indian Ocean. It is currently one of the most active volcanoes in the world, along with Kīlauea in the Hawaiian Islands (Pacific Ocean) Stromboli, Etna (Italy) and Mount Erebus in Antarctica. A recent eruption began in August 2006 and ended in January 2007. The volcano erupted again in February 2007, and most recently on 2 April 2007. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (1024x768, 204 KB) Summary Piton de la Fournaise volcano as seen from Oratoire Sainte Thérèse Photo: B.navez - 01 SEP 2005 - Réunion island Licensing File links The following pages link to this file: Mascarene Islands Metadata This file...
A topographical summit is a point on a surface which is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. ...
Map of Earth showing lines of latitude (horizontally) and longitude (vertically), Eckert VI projection; large version (pdf, 1. ...
Mountains can be characterized in several ways. ...
Shield volcano A shield volcano is a large volcano with shallowly-sloping sides. ...
Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska photographed from the International Space Station For other uses, see Volcano (disambiguation). ...
is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ...
Shield volcano A shield volcano is a large volcano with shallowly-sloping sides. ...
Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska photographed from the International Space Station For other uses, see Volcano (disambiguation). ...
KÄ«lauea is an active volcano in the Hawaiian Islands, one of five shield volcanoes that together form the Island of Hawaii. ...
Map of the Hawaiian Islands, a chain of islands that stretches 2,400 km in a northwesterly direction from the southern tip of the Island of Hawai‘i. ...
Sciara del fuoco For other uses see Stromboli (disambiguation) Stromboli is a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of the three active volcanoes in Italy. ...
For other meanings of Etna, see Etna (disambiguation). ...
Mount Erebus in Antarctica is the southernmost active volcano on Earth. ...
is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ...
Piton de la Fournaise is often known locally as le Volcan (The Volcano); it is a major tourist attraction on Réunion island.
Geography
The top part of the volcano is occupied by the Enclos Fouqué, a caldera 8 kilometres (5 miles) wide. High cliffs known as remparts form the caldera's rim. The caldera is breached to the southeast into the sea. It is also unstable and in the initial stages of failure and will eventually collapse into the Indian Ocean. Whether it will generate a so called "mega-tsunami" is controversial. There is evidence on the submerged flanks and abyssal plain of earlier failures. The lower slopes are known as the Grand Brûlé ("Great Burnt"). Most lava eruptions are confined to the caldera. Satellite image of Santorini. ...
Inside the caldera is a 400 metre high lava shield known as Dolomieu. Atop the lava shield are Bory Crater (Cratère Bory) and Dolomieu Crater (Cratère Dolomieu), which is by far the wider of the two.
Many craters and spatter cones can be found inside the caldera and the outer flanks of the volcano. At the beginning of the path that leads to the summit, there lies a noticeable small crater known as formica leo, named for its similar shape to the pitfall built by the antlion. Craters on Mount Cameroon Perhaps the most conspicuous part of a volcano is the crater, a basin of a roughly circular form within which occurs a vent (or vents) from which magma erupts as gases, lava, and ejecta. ...
Antlions are a family of insects in the order Neuroptera, classified as Myrmeleontidae (sometimes spelled as Myrmeleonidae), from the Greek myrmex, meaning ant, and leo(n), meaning lion; the most known genus is Myrmeleo. ...
Some of the beaches there are of a greenish colour, because of the olivine sand resulting from picrite basalt lavas. The Grand Brûlé is formed from solidified lava flows accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years; the most recent ones are often the darkest and most vegetation-free, while older ones can be covered by dense wild vegetation. The mineral olivine (also called chrysolite and, when gem-quality, peridot) is a magnesium iron silicate with the formula (Mg,Fe)2SiO4. ...
Picrite basalt or oceanite from the Piton de la Fournaise Picrite basalt is a variety of high-magnesium olivine basalt that is very rich in the mineral olivine. ...
The volcano is over 530,000 years old, and for most of its history, its flows have intermingled with those from Piton des Neiges, a larger, older and heavily eroded extinct volcano which forms the northwest two-thirds of Réunion Island. There were three episodes of caldera collapses 250,000, 65,000 and 5,000 years ago. The volcano was formed by the Réunion hotspot, which is believed to have been active for the past 65 million years. There is evidence for explosive eruptions in the past. One explosive eruption about 4,700 years ago may have had a VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) of 5, which is the same as the 18 May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.[2] Piton des Neiges (Snow Peak) is a 3069m high inactive volcano on the island of Réunion, one of the volcanic islands in the Mascarene Archipelago in the southwestern Indian Ocean. ...
The Réunion hotspot is a volcanic hotspot which currently lies under the Island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. ...
For other meanings of Ve, see Ve (disambiguation). ...
is the 138th day of the year (139th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link displays the 1980 Gregorian calendar). ...
For the mountain in California, see Mount Saint Helena. ...
Eruptions
 The erupting lava met the water of the Indian Ocean during the August 2004 eruption. Most eruptions of Piton de la Fournaise are of the Hawaiian style: fluid basaltic lava flowing out with fire fountaining at the vent. Occasionally, phreatic eruptions (groundwater steam-generated eruptions) occur. Lava flows crossing the Grand Brûlé occasionally reach the sea, with spectacular results. Piton de la Fournaise is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, with more than 150 recorded eruptions since the 17th century. Image File history File links contrast enhanced version of http://commons. ...
Image File history File links contrast enhanced version of http://commons. ...
Image File history File links Metadata No higher resolution available. ...
Image File history File links Metadata No higher resolution available. ...
Eruptions within the caldera do not cause much devastation, because the caldera is uninhabited and little infrastructure exists apart from the highway. Lava flows are generally confined to the caldera. However, lava flows have been known to cross the N2 highway; areas where the road was destroyed by the eruption are signposted with the year of eruption after the road is rebuilt. In the early 2000s, the highway thus was destroyed once or more times a year; road engineering services then wait for the lava to cool off and build another stretch of road. It is worth noting that for months after an eruption, the core of the lava flows can still be hot enough to steam in rainy weather.
Eruptions outside of the caldera can pose serious hazards to the population, but are rare. Only six eruptions outside of the caldera have occurred, most recently in 1986. The village of Piton-Sainte-Rose was evacuated in 1977 before it was inundated by a lava flow which destroyed several buildings. The lava flow crossed the highway and surrounded the local church, entered the front door, then stopped without destroying the building. The front entrance was later cleared out, and the church was brought back into service under the name of Notre-Dame des Laves ("Our Lady of the Lavas").
Monitoring Volcanic activity is constantly monitored by geophysical sensors (tiltmeters, extensometers, differential GPS receivers, etc.). The data from those various sensors is sent to a volcanological observatory, located in Bourg-Murat, northwest of the volcano. The observatory, founded in 1978 following the Piton-Sainte-Rose flow, is operated by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Global Geophysics Institute of Paris), in association with CNRS and the University of Réunion. The observatory staff monitors the volcano continuously and closely. A tiltmeter is an instrument designed to measure very small changes from the horizontal level, either on the ground or in structures. ...
Extensometer is a device that is used to measure small/big changes in the length of an object. ...
Over fifty GPS satellites such as this NAVSTAR have been launched since 1978. ...
Bourg-Murat is a village on the RN3 road in Réunion, lying north east of Le Tampon. ...
The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP; French for Paris Institute for the Physics of the Globe) is a French research and higher education establishment located in Paris, dedicated to the study of the Earth (geology, geochemistry, geophysics, seismology. ...
The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) is one of the most prominent scientific research institutions in France. ...
Procedures specify several levels of alert, which are decided by the prefect of Réunion on the basis of scientific reports: In France and many other French-speaking countries, a préfet (English: prefect) is the States representative in a département or région (in the later case, he is called a préfet de région). ...
- Pre-alert: Warnings about possible eruptions; hikers accessing the caldera are warned about possible developments.
- Level 1: An eruption will occur soon; the public may not access the caldera until specialists have examined the situation and set pathways for those willing to admire the eruption.
- Level 2: An eruption is occurring inside the caldera. Access to the caldera is restricted to authorized personnel only.
- Level 3: An eruption is occurring or will occur soon outside of the caldera; some villages may have to be evacuated for safety.
Visit A high quality forestry road, followed by a good track, connects the highway of the plains in Bourg-Murat to the pas de Bellecombe (Bellcombe Pass), where a parking lot and a snack bar are available to visitors. The pas de Bellecombe is situated over the caldera rim cliffs and offers a good point of view over the northeast part of the caldera.
A good stairway path descends from the pass to the caldera floor. This path is closed for safety reasons during seismic events that may precede eruptions and during eruptions. White paint marks over rocks delimit a number of footpaths ascending the lava shield. inside the caldera.
Visitors exploring the caldera should be in good physical condition, with hiking shoes and a supply of drinking water and food. They must be prepared to exercise caution, for the weather can change very quickly, moving from bright sunlight and heat (with risks of heatstroke) to dense fog with cold and rain. In dense fog, straying from paths is very risky. Visitors are advised to take the necessary precautions for sun, heat, cold and rain and not to stray from marked paths.
An excellent, albeit expensive, way to get a good sight of the volcano is to ride in the tourist helicopter flights offered by commercial companies on the island.
The lower parts of the Grand Brûlé can be visited from the N2 highway. Lava flows that have crossed the road are indicated by signs.
References
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