Four Russian Volcanoes Seen from Space Erupting at the Same Time – Gallery

When you think of erupting volcanoes, Siberia is probably the last place that comes to mind. Yet, it's there, technically in the Kamchatka peninsula, that the most active volcanoes in the world are all packed together, 29 out of the 300 or so in the region.

NASA's Terra satellite which, as the name implies, studies the Earth, was lucky to fly by on January 11, 2013 just as four of the volcanoes were erupting at the same time.

The four volcanoes, Shiveluch, Bezymianny, Tolbachik and Kizimen are only 180 kilometers, 110 miles apart and the satellite shot them all in one pass.

They may be close by and they may be erupting at the same time, but they're all quite different. Terra's camera shoots in the near-infrared and the lower visible spectrum (red and green) so what you see here are false-color images. The full-resolution image is here (8 MB).