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Ritter Island

Small volcanic island in Papua New Guinea

Summary

Small volcanic island in Papua New Guinea

Field	Value
name	Ritter Island
photo	File:Ritter island.jpg
photo_caption	Ritter Island in 2004
elevation	140 m
prominence	140 m
location	Papua New Guinea
coordinates
type	Stratovolcano
last_eruption	May 2007

Ritter Island is a small, uninhabited, crescent-shaped volcanic island 100 km north-east of New Guinea, in the Bismarck Sea, situated between Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and close to New Britain island.

It is one of many active volcanoes in PNG, which result from a subduction of the Solomon Sea plate beneath the South Bismarck Plate along the New Britain Trench. There were several recorded eruptions of this basaltic-andesitic stratovolcano in 1699 and 1793, prior to a spectacular lateral collapse which took place in 1888. Before that event, it was a circular conical island about 780 m high.

History

The earliest known sighting of the island by outsiders was by William Dampier, an English explorer, privateer, navigator, and naturalist. He reported that "we heard a dreadful noise like thunder, and saw a flame of fire after it, the most terrifying that ever I saw". The island is believed to have been named after the German geographer, Carl Ritter, when the area formed part of German New Guinea.

1888 eruption

Main article: 1888 Ritter Island eruption and tsunami

At about 5:30 am local time on 13 March 1888 a large portion of the island, containing perhaps 5 km3 of material slid into the sea during a relatively minor, possibly VEI 2, phreatic eruption. Eyewitnesses at Finschhafen, 100 km to the south, heard explosions and observed an almost imperceptible ash fall. Tsunamis 12-15 m high were generated by the collapse and devastated nearby islands and the adjacent New Guinea coast killing around 3,000 people.

The collapse left a 140 m high, 1900 m long crescent-shaped island with a steep west-facing escarpment. At least two small eruptions have occurred offshore since 1888, one in 1972 and another in 1974, which have resulted in the construction of a small submarine edifice within the collapse scar.

References

{{cite gvp
"Perished in Style – Ritter Island, PNG.".
{{cite gvp
(2003). "Ritter Island Volcano—lateral collapse and the tsunami of 1888". Geophysical Journal International.
[http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/group.html Ritter Island at Volcano World]

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

islands-of-papua-new-guinea subduction-volcanoes active-volcanoes stratovolcanoes-of-papua-new-guinea holocene-stratovolcanoes

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