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WONDERS OF NATURE
Kurile Islands. Nature miracle
The island arc of the Kuril Islands stretches for one thousand two hundred kilometers from Kamchatka to the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Thirty-six large islands and more than a hundred small islets and rocks make up this Far Eastern archipelago. It consists of two parallel island chains: the volcanic Greater Kuril Ridge and the Lesser Ridge located to the east, where there are no active volcanoes.
The Kuriles are the second region of active volcanism in Russia after Kamchatka. There are more volcanoes here than on the territory of their northern neighbor - more than a hundred, including forty active ones. But Kuril volcanoes erupt less frequently than their Kamchatka counterparts, and only a few, like Alaid, Tyati, or Sarychev volcano, demonstrate a truly formidable disposition. It is interesting that the names of most volcanoes, as well as bays, straits or waterfalls, are Russian or Japanese and have appeared in the last two hundred years, and almost all the islands have retained the ancient names given to them by the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago - the Ainu. The Kruzenshtern and Bussol straits divide the Great Ridge into three parts: the northern one with the islands of Shumshu, Paramushir, Onekotan and Shiashkotan; the middle one, which includes a mass of small islands and only one large island, Simushir; and the southern one, in which the main, largest and most populated islands are concentrated: Urup, Iturup and Kunashir. This also includes the Lesser Kuril Ridge, which has a length of only one hundred and five kilometers and consists of a fairly large picturesque island of Shikotan and several small islands. Atlasov Island, which is a giant cone of the Alaid volcano that grew out of the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, is located apart in the north of the island chain to the west of Shumshu. This is the most extreme and highest fire-breathing mountain in the Kuriles, rising above the sea for almost two and a half kilometers. Its correct conical top, crowned with a plume of smoke, is somewhat reminiscent of Fujiyama, sung by artists and poets of Japan. In good weather, the peak of Alaid is visible from Kamchatka, and, most likely, it was it that was noticed back in 1698 by the discoverer of the peninsula, Cossack Pentecostal Vladimir Atlasov, who later wrote in his report that "against the first river in the sea I saw as if there were islands." Kamchadals tell a curious legend about this volcano, located in the south of Kamchatka, Lake Kurilskoye, in the center of which is the island Heart of Alaid. In the middle of the Kurile Lake, the legend says, there was once a high and beautiful mountain Alaid. The surrounding mountains, as if by choice, small, nondescript, envied the handsome Alaid and told various dirty tricks about him: he, they say, blocks the sun, and prevents the month from rising to the sky, he clings to the top of Alaid with his horn, and the glacier, where - then he found and sheltered on his slope, and a lot of other things ... Alaid is tired of the evil gossip around. He left the lake, left Kamchatka and found himself a new place - in the sea, near the Kuril Islands. The water of the lake rushed after Alaid, but did not catch up with him. This is how the Ozernaya river was formed in Kamchatka. But love for his native land was strong in Alaida, he could not completely part with it, and left his heart in the lake. So now stands in the middle of the lake islet Uchichi, which means Heart-Stone. Europeans discovered the Kuriles in 1643, when they were visited by the Dutch navigator De Vries. But even thirty years before him, the Japanese had already landed on the southern islands, exploring and trying to settle in Shikotan and Kunashir. However, in 1711, Russian Cossacks headed by Danila Antsiferov and Ivan Kozyrevsky arrived on the islands from Kamchatka. They brought the local Ainu "under the sovereign's hand" and overlaid with tribute-yasak. Since then, the islands have become part of Russia and for almost three centuries (with the exception of forty years between the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 and World War II) have been our eastern outpost. In the entire Russian Far East, deservedly famous for its natural beauties, you will not find more picturesque corners than in the Kuriles. Each island, with rare exceptions, is beautiful in its own way. The formidable grandeur of volcanoes, smoking with gas jets, coexists here with the bizarre beauty of coastal bays and rocks, unusual exotic flora on land and marine curiosities in the Okhotsk and Pacific waters. And if a traveler who has visited Kamchatka, the Ussuri Territory or Sakhalin is overwhelmed with admiration, then he simply falls in love with the Kuriles once and for all. Although the Kuril volcanoes do not threaten with eruptions as often as the Kamchatka ones, they bring even more troubles. And the reason for this is their close proximity to the sea. Any eruption is accompanied by tremors, and they, in turn, cause "seaquakes". And the angry sea falls on the shores of the islands with giant destructive tsunami waves. In 1952, a thirty-meter tsunami completely destroyed the city of Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir Island. The few surviving residents, having lost loved ones, houses and property, left the island forever. Similar disasters have happened before. Back in 1737, the explorer of Kamchatka, Krasheninnikov, described an earthquake and tsunami that devastated the coast of the peninsula and the Northern Kuriles. “At midnight at three o’clock,” he writes, “the shaking began and lasted from a quarter of an hour ... Meanwhile, a terrible noise and excitement arose on the sea, and suddenly the water fell on the banks of the water three sazhens high, which, without standing in the least, ran into sea and moved away from the coast to a considerable distance. Then the earth shook a second time, the water came against the former, but at the ebb it ran so far that it was impossible to see the sea. At that time, stone mountains were seen in the strait between the first and second Kuril Islands at the bottom of the sea , which had never been seen before ... A quarter of an hour after that, a new terrible shaking followed, and, moreover, thirty sazhens of water surged onto the shore ... From this flood, the local inhabitants were completely ruined, and many died miserably in their lives ... " In 1770, during the eruption of the Alaid volcano, a tsunami that arose destroyed the houses and gardens of the inhabitants of Paramushir and Shumshu. And in 1933, a wave twenty meters high hit the island of Harimkotan, where the Sarychev volcano erupted. Since many volcano islands are uninhabited, the eruptions themselves cause serious damage only when they occur on large islands, which are chains of several volcanoes that have grown on a common basis. There are few such islands, but they, naturally, are better inhabited and mastered by man. In Kunashir, the Mendeleev, Golovnin and Tyatya volcanoes are active and dangerous. There are eight active volcanoes on Iturup: the most violent of them are the volcanoes of Baransky, Tebenkov, Ivan the Terrible, Stokap, Atsonupuri and Berutarube. On Simushir, the Burning Sopka, Zavaritsky volcano and Prevo Peak are restless, on Shiashkotan - Sinarki and Kuntomintor, and on Onekotan - Krenitsyn and Nemo volcano. A special case is Paramushir Island. It consists of three parallel fused volcanic ridges, consisting of more than thirty volcanoes. Six of them are active, and the most active Ebeko volcano is located just eight kilometers from Severo-Kurilsk. When this fire-breathing mountain decided to "salute" Women's Day on March 8, 1963, the poisonous sulfur dioxide from the formed fumaroles was blown towards the city by the wind, and residents could not leave their houses. Those who were caught by the gas attack in a cinema or in a club were forced to stay there overnight. Fortunately, in the morning the wind changed, and the situation in the city returned to normal. The island of Atlasov, already mentioned by us, is famous all over the world for its active and very formidable Alaid volcano. It erupts every thirty or forty years. The last time it happened was in 1972. And before that, in 1933, as a result of an underwater eruption, a new island of Taketomi was formed near Alaid. It gradually grew due to new eruptions, and in 1961 connected with its neighbor, forming a peninsula. The mighty Alaid, like the Italian volcano Krakatoa, has served as a beacon for captains going from the Sea of Okhotsk to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky since the time of Bering. It must be admitted that the volcanic activity of the Kuriles has not only negative aspects. On many islands, mineral springs, including hot ones, spring. On Shiashkotan, for example, there are up to a thousand hot springs. And on the island of Urup there is even a hot waterfall! Warm lakes have formed in the craters of some volcanoes, healing many ailments. The same Ebeko volcano has long been serving the residents of Severe-Kurilsk as a kind of "dispensary". Every day off, the people of Kuril go to him to swim in the warm lake located in his crater. The water in this natural pool is heated to almost forty degrees. The Hot Beach on the island of Kunashir is famous all over the planet. You will not find such a miracle of nature anywhere else in the world. It is easy to get to it from Yuzhno-Kurilsk. Only seven kilometers to the south along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and already from afar you can see a stretch of coast shrouded in thick steam. The beach is located at the foot of the Mendeleev volcano, and the volcanic rocks are covered here with a thin layer of sea sand. In some places it is very hot, and in some places wisps of steam make their way through it. This steam, which has risen to the surface along the cracks of volcanic rocks, is, as it were, absorbed in the thickness of the sand and warms it. Wherever you dig a hole on the beach, steam immediately starts to come out of it. A strip of hot sand stretches for almost a kilometer along the coast. The temperature of the steam is one hundred degrees, and the water in the hot springs spouting everywhere is heated to ninety-eight degrees. The inhabitants of the island heat up food on jets of underground steam, use them to heat their houses. Chickens lay here all year round, as in the sheds, heated by steam, it is warm even in winter. The bathhouse and laundry in the local village also do without stokers, and the children love to bake in the hot sand right next to the caught crabs. Despite the constant danger emanating from them, volcanoes are still amazingly beautiful natural structures. These are not always the right cones, like Alaid's. Sometimes it is a double cone, so to speak, "a volcano in a volcano", as, for example, Tyatya. Sometimes it is a mountain crowned with jagged walls, like the ruins of an ancient fortress, and sometimes only depressions-calderas remain from volcanoes. And if these calderas are on the seashore, bays of stunning beauty are formed, such as the Lion's Mouth on Iturup Island. The entrance to it is guarded by the Lion-Stone rock sticking out of the ocean, which really looks like a sleeping lion. The Krenitsyn volcano on Onekotan is unique in its appearance. In the southern part of this long narrow island is Lake Koltsevoe. In the center of the lake-caldera, the cone of a young volcano has ascended for almost a kilometer and a half. The top of the black mountain is powdered with snow and smokes a little, reminding of its origin. And on the coast of the island of Harimkotan, after the next eruption of the Severgin volcano, many small lakes were formed, fed by streams flowing from its slopes. The water of the streams is saturated with mineral salts, and at the bottom of the lakes these salts are deposited in concentric circles, forming multi-colored sediments: red, orange, yellow, green, white. Each lake has its own, special color of the bottom, and in the sun's rays, a scattering of water saucers shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow. The structure of the Zavaritsky volcano on Simushir is unusual. Here, from the bottom of the ancient caldera, as on the Krenitsyn volcano, a new cone has grown. But he, in turn, exploded, forming a "caldera within a caldera." Its middle is occupied by Lake Biryuzov. This is probably the most beautiful lake in the archipelago: in good weather, its waters really sparkle with turquoise and gently shimmer in the sun. This is due to the fact that the water of the caldera lake contains the smallest particles of sulfur that reflect light. The wildlife of the islands is a worthy setting for the volcanic landscape of the Kuril chain. Its originality is explained by the great length of the archipelago. Its northern islands are adjacent to the snowy Kamchatka, where the largest bears in Russia roam the gloomy taiga, and the rarest bighorn sheep can still be found on steep cliffs. And from the southern islands, in good weather, Hokkaido is visible, where cheerful macaques frolic in groves of tropical plants and warm volcanic springs. In addition, the cold Oya-Sio current runs along the Pacific coast of the Kuril ridge, bringing fogs, rains and cold winds. The Okhotsk coast of the South Kuriles is washed by the warm Soya Current, one of the branches of the Pacific Gulf Stream - the Kuro-Sio Current. Therefore, the vegetation of the Kuriles differs sharply not only in the northern and southern parts of the archipelago, but even on opposite shores of the same islands. The northern islands: Shumshu, Paramushir and others are the realm of cedar and alder elfin, and the temperature in summer does not rise above ten degrees here. And in the south - on Iturup, Kunashir and their neighbors - real forests of fir, oak, maple, wild cherry with an undergrowth of bamboo rise. Even a yew and a velvet tree grow on Shikotan. All this diverse forest stand is densely intertwined with wild grapes and other creepers. Add to this the magnolia, found in the south of Shikotan, and you will understand that the local flora is already close to subtropical. At the same time, on the southern, Pacific coast of the same Iturup, the slopes are covered with the same elfin cedar as on Paramushir, and as soon as you cross the volcanic ridge to the Okhotsk coast, thickets of three-meter bamboo will approach the path. But the land fauna of the islands is not rich: bears, foxes and small rodents - voles, shrews. True, herds of mustangs still graze on several islands - feral horses brought here before the war by Japanese cavalrymen. But the sea coast pleases with the richness of the animal world. Killer whales and sperm whales, gray whales and dolphins frolic everywhere in the Kuril waters, from the Strait of Treason, which separates Kunashir from Hokkaido, to the First Kuril Strait north of Shumshu. Here you can meet fur seals and sea otters, seals and the largest of the seals - sea lions. These huge animals, sometimes weighing a ton, sometimes come into battle even with young sperm whales. On every island or on the rocks near its shores, there are necessarily bird colonies. Hundreds of thousands of white-headed gulls, kittiwakes, cormorants, fulmars and puffins inhabit the Kuriles. And they all have enough food - after all, places where warm and cold currents meet are always especially rich in fish. Huge flocks of large silvery wasashi sardines, saury, pollock and halibut come here. Here expanse for flounders, sea bass and gobies. And red fish rise to spawn in the rivers: chum salmon, pink salmon and char. It is clear that both animals and birds of the Kuriles are always provided with food. It is still difficult to get to this Far Eastern volcanic archipelago. Only three motor ships go here from Vladivostok via Sakhalin. They go to the southern Kuriles for two days, to the northern ones - all five. Kamchatka's coasters, which go around the peninsula, also call at Paramushir. But in winter, when the Sea of Okhotsk is ice-bound, the islands are connected to the mainland only by rare flights. But the inaccessibility only makes the goal more desirable. And if the traveler managed to get to the Kuriles, what he saw there will never be erased from his memory. Already sailing through the Catherine Strait (between Iturup and Kunashir), he will see five volcanoes from the deck at once, including the almost two-kilometer handsome Tyatya, which, like Alaid, serves as a lighthouse at the exit from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Pacific Ocean. Having landed on the shore in Yuzhno-Kurilsk, you can, taking advantage of the low tide, in an hour and a half walk along the black sand rolled by waves to the Hot Beach, swim in its springs and marvel at this kilometer-long hot "frying pan" full of steam. And wading through the Kunashir bamboo jungle and elfin cedar to the top of the Mendeleev volcano, the traveler will be able to see fumaroles, mud volcanoes, and amazing sulfur fields on the slope of the volcano. Indeed, there are not many places on Earth where icicles of yellow sulfur grow right before our eyes on stone cornices near the outlets of gas jets. You can stick a branch of elfin in the stream, and in ten minutes it will turn into a kind of yellow coral. No less wonders of nature and on the largest island of the Kuril Islands - Iturup. Here falls into the ocean from black basalt rocks the highest waterfall in Russia - 140-meter Ilya Muromets. Here is the picturesque bay of the Lion's Mouth, the fumaroles of the Berutarube volcano and Lake Krasivoye in the Urbich caldera. Iturup has the most beautiful forests rich in berries and mushrooms. Locals gather here some special "Japanese mushroom", the size of a frying pan. They say that it is never wormy, and the taste is not inferior to white. In the main village of Malokurilsk, where a whale meat processing plant existed for many years, until Russia stopped their production, you can see the most unusual fences in the world - from a whalebone! And all this exoticism is seen so far, not counting the people of Kuril and the border guards themselves, forty to fifty people a year. Tourist development of the amazing archipelago, the edge of volcanoes and fumaroles, bamboo and magnolias, bird colonies and sea lion rookeries, waterfalls and bizarre rocks, has not even begun yet. But an inquisitive traveler, if desired, could already make a cruise, for example, along the route: Iturup - Kunashir - Shikotan. On this way, he would look into the fabulous Lion's Mouth with its XNUMX-meter sheer walls and for the first time feel himself inside a real volcanic vent, feel the Hot Beach under his feet and hear the roar of Kunashir's solfataras, sail through the Shikotan fjords and meet the dawn on a distant beautiful cape with an expressive called the End of the World. And, looking at the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, I would almost physically feel that the next land in the east was eight thousand kilometers. As much as west to Moscow... Author: B.Wagner
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