Bamus volcano (also known as South Son, Ulawun being the father) is a symmetrical stratovolcano SW of Ulawun volcano, 16 km inland from Stettin Bay.
The volcano is thickly covered by rainforest and fern thickets. The last confirmed activity of Bamus was around 1888, as villagers describe in local accounts.
2006, 1886 ± 8 years, 1650 ± 50 years, 270 BC ± 50 years, 350 BC ± 75 years
Typical eruption style
effusive (lava domes)
Bamus has a 800 m diameter breached summit crater filled by a lava dome consisting of basalt-andesitic bouldery lava. The dome has overflowed the old crater through gaps on the west, south west and south east.
There are fumaroles, sulfur deposits and steam vents on the lava dome. The steam plume emitted from the dome is visible from the sea.
Bamus volcano has a flank cone on the southern flank and a large, 1.5-km-wide crater with 2 small adjacent cones halfway up the SE flank. Young pyroclastic-flow deposits are found on the volcano's flanks.
Bamus and Ulawun are the highest volcano, and 400 m higher than all other volcanoes of the 1000 km long Bismarck arc. This suggests that they are near the stability limit of how high volcanoes in this arc grow, before they tend to suffer collapse.
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Sources:
- Smithsonian / GVP
- Johnson et al (1983) "Bamus volcano, Papua New Guinea: Dormant neighbour of Ulawun, and magnesian-andesite locality", Geologische Rundschau, Volume 72, Number 1, pp. 207-237
