Qualla: Ulawun

Ulawun: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Umbra Lab, Inc., CC BY 4.0. On June 26, 2019, at roughly 7 a.m., the sky above western New Britain turned into a nineteen-kilometer column of ash. Ulawun had woken up again - not with a whisper, but with a sub-Plinian eruption that cancelled flights into Hoskins Airport, cut the New Britain Highway in three places, and sent more than five thousand people running from their homes. The volcano that Papua New Guinea's geological survey watches more closely than almost any other had done what scientists always knew it might do. Four years later, in November 2023, the alert level climbed to four, the top of the scale, and a plume drifted 520 kilometers to the west before the mountain quieted again.

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Image: Umbra Lab, Inc. | CC BY 4.0

Ulawun: A Mountain on the Shortlist

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. Of the world's roughly 1,500 active volcanoes, the international scientific community has singled out just sixteen for special scrutiny. They call them the Decade Volcanoes, and Ulawun is one of them. The criteria are unsentimental: a history of large, destructive eruptions, and ...

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Ulawun: Tectonic Machinery

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. Ulawun is not a quirk of the landscape. It is the surface expression of something enormous happening underneath the sea floor. The Solomon Sea Plate is sliding beneath the South Bismarck Plate along the New Britain subduction zone, dragging ocean crust down into the mantle. Water...

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Ulawun: A Long Record of Reckonings

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. The written history of Ulawun begins in 1700, when the English buccaneer-turned-navigator William Dampier sailed past New Britain and noted the volcano's activity in his logs. Dampier's observation became the first of at least twenty-two recorded eruptions in the centuries since....

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Image: NASA | Public domain

Ulawun: Living in the Blast Radius

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. What does it mean to farm coconut palms on the slope of a Decade Volcano? The answer, for the people of West New Britain Province, is that life continues because it must. The soil on Ulawun's flanks is volcanic and rich. Cocoa, coconuts, and small gardens thrive. Hoskins Airport ...

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Image: NASA | Public domain