Nevado Del Ruiz - Geography and Geology

Geography and Geology

Nevado del Ruiz, which lies about 129 kilometers (80 mi) west of Bogotá, is part of the Andes mountain range. The volcano is part of the Ruiz–Tolima volcanic massif (or Cordillera Central), a group of five ice-capped volcanoes which includes the Tolima, Santa Isabel, Quindio and Machin volcanoes. The massif is located at the intersection of four faults, some of which still are active.

Nevado del Ruiz lies within the Pacific Ring of Fire, a region that encircles the Pacific Ocean and contains some of the world's most active volcanoes. It is the third most northerly of the volcanoes lying in the North Volcanic Zone of the Andean Volcanic Belt, which contains 75 of the 204 Holocene-age volcanoes in South America. The Andean Volcanic Belt is produced by the eastward subduction of the oceanic Nazca Plate beneath the South American continental plate. As is the case for many subduction-zone volcanoes, Nevado del Ruiz can generate explosive Plinian eruptions with associated pyroclastic flows that can melt snow and glaciers near the summit, producing large and sometimes devastating lahars (mud and debris flows).

Like many other Andean volcanoes, Nevado del Ruiz is a stratovolcano: a voluminous, roughly conical volcano consisting of many strata of hardened lava and tephra including volcanic ash. Its lavas are andesitic–dacitic in composition. The modern volcanic cone comprises five lava domes, all constructed within the caldera of an ancestral Ruiz volcano: Nevado El Cisne, Alto de la Laguna, La Olleta, Alto la Pirana, and Alto de Santano. It covers an area of more than 200 square kilometers (77 sq mi), stretching 65 kilometers (40 mi) from east to west. The mountain's broad summit includes the Arenas crater, which is one kilometer in diameter and 240 meters (790 ft) deep.

The summit of the volcano has steep slopes inclining from 20 to 30 degrees. At lower elevations, the slopes become less steep; their inclination is about 10 degrees. From there on, foothills stretch almost to the edge of the Magdalena River north of the volcano and the Cauca River to the west. On the two major sides of the summit, headwalls show where past rock avalanches occurred. At times, ice on the summit has melted, generating devastating lahars, including the continent's deadliest eruption in 1985. On the volcano's southwest flank is the pyroclastic cone La Olleta, which is not currently active, but may have erupted in historical times.