Santa Maria Volcano

Santa Maria Volcano rises in Guatemala's western highlands near the city of Quetzaltenango, part of the Sierra Madre range, reaching an elevation of about 3,772 meters. It is a stratovolcano built by subduction of the Cocos Plate beneath the Caribbean Plate, and its October 1902 eruption, rated VEI-6, was one of the three largest volcanic eruptions of the twentieth century, ejecting roughly eight cubic kilometers of magma, scattering ash as far as San Francisco, and killing an estimated 6,000 people. Beginning in 1922, a lava dome complex called Santiaguito grew inside the crater left by that eruption, and it remains active in cycles today, having extruded more than a cubic kilometer of lava, including a period of renewed dome growth and lava flows between 2011 and 2015. This entity documents Santa Maria Volcano specifically as a geological formation, the Guatemalan stratovolcano behind one of the twentieth century's three largest eruptions and its still-active Santiaguito dome complex.