It’s a difficult day for the people living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeast Russia. First, a 7.0 earthquake hit in the middle of the night on Saturday (local time) and then a few hours later, the friendly regional volcano blows up, spewing a column of ash five miles into the air.
According to CNN, the epicenter of the quake was about 30 miles east of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the largest population center in the region where 179,000, more than half the area’s population, live. The Shiveluch volcano, at more than 10,000 feet elevation, is the northernmost volcano in a chain on the peninsula.