1998 Kamchatka

Location: Paratunka, Kamchatka, Russia

Date: 14th to 24th September 1998.

The workshop was held in Paratunka, Kamchatka, Russia. Paratunka is an area of geothermal springs at about 60 km from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

Local Organization:

The Local Organizing Committee was coordinated by Dr. Evgenii Gordeev.

Workshop Title

Geophysical Investigation of Active Volcanoes: Prognosis and mechanisms of Volcanic Eruptions

Official language

Although the official language of the Workshop was only English, due to the high number of Russian participants, we decided to give the talks (and the following discussions!) in both languages. This was possible thanks to the great effort of Dr. Gordeev, who translated in real time most of the talks between the two languages.

Conference Fee

As always, no fee was required to participate in the workshop.

Participants, Program and Abstracts

A full list of participants is available.

A complete program schedule of the workshop is here.

A book of abstracts was distributed during the workshop, a copy is available here.

Field excursions

Besides oral scientific sessions, field trips to volcanoes were organized, including Mutnovsky, Gorely, Avachinsky, Karymsky, Tolbachik. Many other volcanoes could be observed from the top of the visited ones, or from the helicopter.

One day was dedicated to the visit of the Kamchatkian Department of Geophysical Service, the Institute of Volcanology and the Institute of Volcanic Geology and Geochemistry. The city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was also visited.

Some less serious observations...

Weather

One of the most criticized sentences (especially by a portoguese participant who came almost directly from Capo Verde islands...) in our webpage before the workshop was this:

"The weather in September in Kamchatka is usually a bit cold and rainy (especially in the mountains)".

But we swear that the temperature never went below -5 ° C and we also had beautiful days with temperature greater than 15 ° C!!! ... The only problem was that they were exactly the days when we had the sessions and not the excursions...

Flights

The flights were reliable, as promised by our webpage. We only left a couple of Japanese people in Khabarovsk for a couple of days...