'Pearl of Kamchatka' geysers lost under mudslide lake
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It is one of the world's last natural wonders, a lunar landscape of spewing volcanic craters and gurgling eruptions. But yesterday environmentalists were assessing the damage done by a landslide to one of Russia's most famous attractions.
The Valley of the Geysers in the Kronotsky national reserve has 90 or so geysers and a dazzling array of thermal pools.
The valley is the most popular tourist attraction in the far-east region of Kamchatka - even if visitors must be rich enough to fly in by helicopter before walking beside geothermals blasting off mud and steam.
A mound covered by snow collapsed "within seconds" on Sunday and caused a huge landslide engulfing two-thirds of the valley, park ranger Valery Tsypkov told Russian TV yesterday. Millions of cubic metres of mud and stones were dumped in the landslide's path, destroying most of the geysers and springs.
The torrent stopped metres away from the valley's hotel, the ranger said. Tourists and park staff had to be evacuated, although two Germans making a documentary refused; no injuries were reported.
"The mudslide erased the pearl of Kamchatka and a part of the Unesco world heritage site at Geyser Valley in just three minutes," said Laura Williams, director of the Kamchatka office of the Word Wildlife Fund, in a statement on its website.
"The torrent of mud blocked a river, created a dam, and the water level began to increase rapidly. The majority of geysers situated on the banks of the river were covered with water.
"The scale of the disaster is striking, especially for those who saw the unique place before the disaster. Everybody is used to the fact that such disasters are normally man-made. In this case nature itself destroyed its own treasure."
"The splendour of the valley has changed beyond recognition," said the director of Kronotsky national reserve, Natalya Radugova.
Others, however, were more sanguine and suggested that tourists would probably continue to visit. One tourist officer, Denis Lazarev, believed that the dam created by the mudslide would turn the 6km-long valley into a thermal lake, and this lake could in turn become the new "tourist jewel of Russia".
A sparsely populated peninsula, Kamchatka is 4,200 miles and a nine-hour flight from Moscow. It was completely closed to foreigners until 1990, but now attracts thousands of tourists annually. The valley is 125 miles north of Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka's main city, which looks onto a range of snow-capped mountains and two imposing volcanoes.
The geyser valley was only discovered in 1941, but later in Soviet times the area was hugely popular all across Russia. These days, though, it is a destination only for the curious rich, with four- and five-hour helicopter trips to the valley costing $500 a head.
"This is tragic for humankind, in that we have lost one of the great natural wonders of the world," Ms Williams said, before concluding on a philosophical note: "But for nature, this is only a blip in the history of the planet's evolution."
Others did not share such cosmic insouciance. "The consequences of such a natural catastrophe are irreversible," said Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia's environmental agency, Rosprirodnadzor.
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