2021 Mount Nyiragongo eruption
Province of North Kivu
On 22 May 2021, Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began erupting. As of 25 May, 32 people died as a result of the eruption and 1,000 homes were destroyed.
Background
According to a Virunga National Park official, the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo is similar to the eruption in 2002, which caused the death of 250 people. In September 2020, Katcho Karume, director of the Goma Volcano Observatory, said that the lava lake had been rapidly filling, increasing the risk of an eruption in the next few years, though Karume also noted that an earthquake could trigger an eruption earlier. The Observatory had not been properly functioning for almost a year before the eruption, after the World Bank cut funding following allegations of corruption. The Observatory was unable to pay for an internet connection to connect remote monitors or for fuel to regularly transport staff to the observation points; staff manually downloaded data from memory cards during their few visits to the volcano. In August 2020, a report in Geophysical Research Letters based on a comparison of historical and current activity at Nyiragongo noted the possibility of a flank eruption between March 2024 and November 2027.
Eruption
At about 6:30 p.m. (CAT) on 22 May 2021, a flank of Mount Nyiragongo erupted and lava began to flow towards the city of Goma about 20 kilometers to the south, which had a population of 2 million people. The DRC government urged residents of the city to evacuate.
The public source identifies “2021 Mount Nyiragongo eruption” as province of North Kivu. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mount, Nyiragongo and eruption.
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This entry incorporates text from “2021 Mount Nyiragongo eruption” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.