Travel Photography: Exploring the Majestic View of Mount Pinatubo
Mount Pinatubo is situated in the southern part of Luzon. It is one of the biggest volcanoes in the Philippines. In 1991, the Pinatubo became in a few months one of the most known volcanoes in the world. In that year the Pinatubo erupted violently. More than 700 people were killed. Huge masses of volcanic material** flew out of the crater and covered in a few days an area of more than 400 km². At the beginning of the eruption enormous ash clouds*** were blasted out into the air.
The eruption in 1991
At first there were earthquakes, small explosions and emissions of steam and minor ash. The earthquakes and emissions continued and increased. After more than 2 months of increasing activity, strong explosions culminated in one of the largest eruptions of this century. During more than 15 hours, volcanic ash plumes went straight up to 30 km altitude into the sky. The ash plumes spread out in the air in the days after the first explosions. Within ten days, the cloud formed a nearly continuous band that stretched 11.000 kilometres from Southeast Asia to Central Africa!
The word pinatubo could mean "fertile place where one can make crops grow", or could mean "made to grow", in Tagalog and Sambal, which may suggest a knowledge of its previous eruption in about 1500 AD. There is a local oral tradition suggestive of a folk memory of earlier large eruptions. An ancient legend tells of Bacobaco, a terrible spirit of the sea, who could metamorphose into a huge turtle and throw fire from his mouth. In the legend, when being chased by the spirit hunters, Bacobaco flees to the mountain and digs a great hole in its summit showering the surrounding land with rock, mud, dust and fire for three days; howling so loudly that the earth shakes.
The caldera formed and Lake Pinatubo has since become a tourist attraction with the preferred route through Barangay Santa Juliana in Capas, Tarlac.
Pinatubo belongs to the Cabusilan Mountains, the central range of the Zambales Mountains, which consists of Mt. Cuadrado, Mt. Negron, Mt. Mataba and Mt. Pinatubo. They are subduction volcanoes, formed by the Eurasian Plate sliding under the Philippine Mobile Belt along the Manila Trench to the west. Mount Pinatubo and the other volcanoes on this volcanic belt arise due to magma occlusion from this subduction plate boundary.
The Aeta people were the hardest hit by the eruption. After the areas surrounding the volcano were declared safe, many Aetas returned to their old villages only to find them destroyed by pyroclastic and lahar deposits. Some were able to return to their former way of life, but most moved instead to government-organized resettlement areas. Conditions on these were poor, with each family receiving only small plots of land not ideal for growing crops. Many Aeta found casual labor working for lowland farmers, and overall Aeta society became much more fragmented, and reliant on and integrated with lowland culture.
The summit of the volcano collapsed!
The violent explosion on the 15th of June in 1991 broke away a big part of the top of the Pinatubo*. The summit of the volcano collapsed into the under laying magma chamber. The result was an enormous depression, the caldera, with a 2.5 kilometre diameter! The new summit of the volcano was 145 meters lower than before the explosion.
On June 15, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide were discharged into the atmosphere, resulting in a decrease in the temperature worldwide over the next few years.
Many of the Aeta who lived on the slopes of the volcano left their villages of their own volition when the first explosions began in April, gathering in a village about 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from the summit. They moved to increasingly distant villages as the eruptions escalated, some Aeta moving up to nine times in the two months before the colossal eruption.
On January 14, 2010, some 7,000 Aeta families from Zambales were officially granted the Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) covering the Zambales side of Pinatubo which includes the summit and Lake Pinatubo, officially becoming their lutan tua (ancestral land). The ancestral domain title covers 15,984 ha (39,500 acres) and includes the villages of Burgos, Villar, Moraza and Belbel in Botolan and portions of the towns of Cabangan, San Felipe and San Marcelino.
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All photos are taken with #Fujifilm X-T1 and 18-55mm kitlens. Hope to see you on my next #photoescapade.
If you want to travel and experience Mt. Pinatubo Trek, please check our website @ www.visit7107islands.com. Thank you!
