Top 10 Volcanoes in the Aleutians
The Aleutian arc sweeps for 2,500 kilometres between mainland Alaska and Kamchatka, marking the boundary where the Pacific plate dives beneath the North American. There are more than fifty volcanoes along it; about half are active. Most can only be reached by boat or floatplane, and most are watched mainly from satellites.
1. Pavlof
One of the most consistently active volcanoes in North America. Pavlof produces small-to-medium eruptions every few years and is photographed from passenger flights over the Alaska Peninsula. Its neighbour Pavlof Sister forms one of the chain's prettiest twin profiles.
2. Cleveland
A nearly perfect cone on Chuginadak Island in the central Aleutians. Cleveland has been almost continuously restless since 2001, with frequent ash plumes that disrupt North Pacific air routes. There are no permanent inhabitants on the island.
3. Shishaldin
A tall, slender stratovolcano on Unimak Island, sometimes called the "Fuji of Alaska" for its symmetry. It has erupted several times in recent decades, including a sustained sequence in 2019-23. The lighthouse at Cape Sarichef has watched it for over a century.
4. Bogoslof
A submarine volcano with a small island summit in the eastern Aleutians. Its 2016-17 eruption produced more than seventy explosions and entirely rebuilt the island. Bogoslof appears and disappears on the map between eruptions.
5. Akutan
A heavily glaciated volcano on Akutan Island, the most populated in the chain. Frequent ash eruptions through the twentieth century have eased since the 1990s, but the steam plume is usually visible. Akutan town sits in a sheltered bay west of the cone.
6. Augustine
An isolated island volcano in Cook Inlet, much closer to Anchorage. Augustine has erupted six times since the late nineteenth century. The 1883 collapse generated a tsunami that struck the Kenai Peninsula; 2006 was its most recent significant eruption.
7. Redoubt
A glacier-clad stratovolcano near Cook Inlet, famous for the 1989 eruption that flamed out the engines of a passenger jet at 8,000 metres — the aircraft restarted them and landed safely. Redoubt erupted again in 2009 with months of lahars and ash.
8. Veniaminof
A vast caldera volcano on the Alaska Peninsula whose interior is filled with an ice cap. Frequent low-level eruptions melt holes in the ice; the caldera floor is one of the more surreal volcanic landscapes in the United States.
9. Okmok
A wide caldera on Umnak Island whose 43 BCE eruption is now implicated by tree-ring and ice-core records in the cooling that followed Caesar's assassination. The caldera floor holds several post-caldera cones and small lakes.
10. Korovin
A persistently steaming stratovolcano on Atka Island. Atka village sits a short distance below it; the inhabitants live with the constant gas plume as a fixed feature of the landscape.
How to see them
Cruises along the Alaska Peninsula and through the chain reach a few of these. Commercial flights from Anchorage to Adak overfly the arc. The Alaska Volcano Observatory's webcams and satellite imagery are how the rest of us mostly watch.
See them on the map
Open the map and trace the Aleutian arc from the Alaska Peninsula westward to Attu. The arc continues across the international date line into the Russian Komandorski Islands.