Cotopaxi

Cotopaxi is a stratovolcano in the Andes roughly 50 kilometers south of Quito, Ecuador, reaching about 5,897 meters, making it one of the highest active volcanoes in the world and a near-perfectly symmetrical, glacier-capped cone widely regarded as one of the most recognizable peaks in South America. Formed by subduction of the Nazca Plate beneath the South American Plate along the Andean volcanic arc, Cotopaxi is built from andesitic and dacitic material and has erupted more than fifty times in recorded history since the 16th century; its glacier cap poses a particular hazard, since eruptions can rapidly melt ice and snow to trigger destructive lahars capable of reaching populated valleys and the Pacific coastal lowlands far from the volcano itself, as happened after major eruptions in 1877 and again in a more recent active phase beginning in 2015 that prompted evacuations around Quito and Latacunga. The mountain sits within Cotopaxi National Park, one of Ecuador's most visited protected areas, and its dramatic silhouette has made it a recurring subject in South American landscape painting, notably by the 19th-century artist Frederic Edwin Church. This entity documents Cotopaxi specifically as a geological formation, a glacier-capped Andean stratovolcano whose eruptions repeatedly trigger far-reaching ice-melt lahars.