1. PO Box 189, Baliu-centre, USSR

Abstract

GASEOUS-MUD volcanoes are one of the most interesting peculiarities of the Earth. They are known in the USSR, in Italy, Rumania, Indonesia, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in Colombia, on the Island of Trinidad, and other areas of the world. The most powerful gaseous-mud volcanoes often not only fail to be inferior to the typically magmatic ones but sometimes surpass them in external effects and in scale. The crater diameters of such typical magmatic volcanoes as Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Klyuchevaya Sopka amount to 450–900 m. The diameters of major gaseous-mud volcanoes are in the range 300–1,000 m (the Tourgai, Mishovdag, Kalmas, Otmanbozdag and other volcanoes of East Transcaucasia). The heights of the most powerful gaseous-mud volcanoes reach several hundred metres (the Tourgai volcano 400 m, the Akhtarma-Pashali 300 m, and so on). Fig. 1 is an aerial photograph of one of the gaseous-mud volcanic giants, the Tourgai volcano located 13 km to the west of the Caspian Sea; the crater diameter of this volcano exceeds 0.5 km, whereas the diameter of its base is more than 3 km.