Qualla: Puyehue-Cordón Caulle

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In June 2011, a volcano in southern Chile reached across the world and cancelled flights in Australia. When the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle complex tore open on June 4, it flung a column of ash ten kilometers into the sky, and the high winds of the Southern Hemisphere did the rest - carrying the cloud east over Argentina, then around the entire globe, until it returned to its starting point two weeks later. Airports closed in Bariloche, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and as far away as Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, and Auckland. A remote ridge in the Andes had briefly become one of the most disruptive places on the planet.

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Puyehue-Cordón Caulle: Four Volcanoes, One Massif

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Despite its single fearsome reputation, this is not one volcano but several, fused into a northwest-trending massif between two lakes - Ranco to the north, Puyehue to the south. Geologists count four edifices: the collapsed Cordillera Nevada caldera, the ancient Mencheca volcano,...

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Puyehue-Cordón Caulle: Three Hundred Thousand Years

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The complex has been reshaping this land for roughly 300,000 years, and the rocks read like chapters. Around 300,000 years ago the old Mencheca volcano faded as the active front of Andean volcanism shifted west, kindling new vents. Some 100,000 years ago an immense eruption laid ...

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Puyehue-Cordón Caulle: The Quake's Echo

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cordón Caulle is the restless heart of the complex, the only vent with a real historical record of eruptions - in 1921, 1929, and 1934. But its most haunting performance came in 1960. On May 22 that year, the largest earthquake ever measured, magnitude 9.5, ruptured the Chilean c...

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Puyehue-Cordón Caulle: The Cloud That Circled the Earth

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2011 eruption made all of this vivid for a new generation. By the time it began, 3,500 people had been evacuated from the surrounding country, and ash soon lay thirty centimeters deep around Bariloche, just across the Argentine border. For days the column held at ten kilomete...

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