Mount Unzen

Mount Unzen is a group of overlapping composite volcanic domes on the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, with its highest point, Mount Fugen, reaching 1,483 meters until a new lava dome, Heisei-shinzan, grew slightly taller during a major eruptive episode. Built from dacite and andesite magma, the volcano is notorious for a catastrophic 1792 eruption and collapse of its Mayuyama dome that triggered a landslide and tsunami killing roughly 15,000 people, one of Japan's deadliest volcanic disasters. It erupted again from 1990 to 1995, a period during which repeated dome collapses generated fast-moving pyroclastic flows; one such flow on June 3, 1991, killed 43 people, including the noted volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and Harry Glicken, who were observing the eruption at close range. The eruption sequence left behind the still-visible Heisei-shinzan lava dome complex on the mountain's flank. This entity documents Mount Unzen specifically as a geological formation, a dacite-andesite dome volcano whose 1991 pyroclastic flow killed 43 people including three volcanologists.