Qualla: Hudson Volcano

Hudson Volcano: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, it looks like a glacier with a lava flow running through it. The dark streak emerging from the ice is not lava at all but the Huemules Glacier, buried so thoroughly in old volcanic ash that snow can no longer cover it. That single deception tells you what Hudson is: a volcano wearing a disguise. Beneath a ten-kilometer caldera packed with ice sits the most active volcano in all of Patagonia, so well hidden by remoteness and dense forest that scientists did not even recognize it as a volcano until 1970. It looks like nothing. It has erupted 55 times in the last 22,000 years.

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Hudson Volcano: The Eight Days That Reached Antarctica

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the evening of August 8, 1991, after only a few hours of warning tremors, Hudson tore open. The first phase was phreatomagmatic, magma meeting ice and water, ripping a four-kilometer fissure across the northwestern caldera. Four days later a second, more violent vent opened in...

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Hudson Volcano: What the Ash Did to Those Below

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The numbers are abstract until you imagine the people and animals beneath them. The ash buried pastures and contaminated water across the sheep country of southern Patagonia. Across Argentina's Santa Cruz Province, where damage ran past ten million dollars, roughly half of all gr...

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Hudson Volcano: A Volcano Born of a Tearing Earth

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hudson sits at one of the most geologically strange places on the planet. Just offshore, an entire oceanic ridge is diving into the trench beneath South America, forming the Chile Triple Junction, and the descending plate has torn open a window in the slab below. That window help...

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Hudson Volcano: Deeper Time and Older Catastrophes

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1991 eruption was not even Hudson's worst. Around 7,750 years ago, the volcano produced the largest known Holocene eruption in the southern Andes, an event so vast its ash blanketed all of southern Patagonia and more than 40,000 square kilometers of Tierra del Fuego, in place...

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