Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Buried Houses of Mount Unzen Disaster

 


Not far from the Unzen Disaster Museum is yet another memorial of the volcanic disaster from the early 1990's.


A series of houses buried under meters of material with often just their roofs showing.


These houses were buried by what is called "lahar", a kind of mudflow comprised of a slurry of pyroclastic debris, ash, rocks, etc combined with rain after a volcanic eruption.


In the eruption of 1792 a massive landslide caused enough material to flow into the Ariake Sea that it caused a megatsunami, but here the flow was much slower and everybody had safely been evacuated.


One group of houses has had a roof built over it to make a museum.


The previous post was on the architecturally intriguing Unzen Disaster Museum.


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