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Young Reporter's Story Ideas
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Chilean Volcano Blows!
by Valarie Potell
An erupting volcano in Chile has forced people to leave their homes and closed one town for an undetermined amount of time.
The volcano started erupting on May 2, after being inactive for thousands of years. Chaiten, a town which was home to 4,500 people, is six miles from the volcano, and the Chilean government declared the evacuated town closed. The future of the town is now uncertain because it has been flooded by a river that overflowed. The parts of Chaiten that aren’t waterlogged are coated in ash.
The volcano has been spewing ash, gas and molten rock into the air, and the cloud of ash above the volcano has been as high as 20 miles!
Chile has a chain of approximately 2,000 volcanoes, 500 of which are potentially active. Chile’s volcanoes are the second longest chain in the world, after Indonesia. The Chaiten volcano is about 750 miles south of Santiago, the capital of Chile.
Chile declared its independence from Spain in 1810, and won its independence in 1818. The country has gone through several forms of government, but the current government is a republic. In 2006, Michelle
Bachelet was elected president of Chile. She is the first woman in the country’s history to hold this position.
Chile is a South American country that is slightly smaller than twice the size of Montana and is home to more than 16 million people. In addition to lots of volcanoes, Chile also faces severe earthquakes and tsunamis.
In the northern part of the country, the Atacama Desert stretches between the Pacific coastal mountains and the Andes. The Atacama is called the driest place on Earth, but it is not as hot as many other deserts. Average temperatures range between 32 to 77 degrees.
Humboldt penguins inhabit the northern Chilean coastline, while southern Chile is home to three species of penguin: the Magellanic, Southern Rockhopper and Macaroni penguins.
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