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45-522: The volcanic group lies on the Kurile arc of the Pacific ring of fire , and consists of andesite , basalt , and dacite stratovolcanoes and lava domes . The group gets its name from the highest peak in the group, Mount Tokachi. The most recent activity is centered on the northwest end. The following table lists the mountains in the volcanic group. Other peaks include: This Hokkaidō location article

90-720: A feudal lord of Japan, became independent from the Ando clan (the family of Goro Ando). The Japanese administration first took nominal control of the islands during the Edo period (1603-1868) in the form of claims by the Matsumae clan . The Shōhō Era Map of Japan ( Shōhō kuni ezu ( 正保国絵図 ) ), a map of Japan made by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1644, shows 39 large and small islands northeast of Hokkaido's Shiretoko Peninsula and Cape Nosappu . A Dutch expedition under Maarten Gerritsz Vries explored

135-521: A landscape. Only the southernmost island has large areas covered by trees, while more northerly islands have no trees, or spotty tree cover. The northernmost, Atlasov Island (Oyakoba in Japanese), is an almost-perfect volcanic cone rising sheer out of the sea; it has been praised by the Japanese in haiku , wood-block prints , and other forms, in much the same way as the better-known Mount Fuji . Its summit

180-658: A popular domestic cat. Among terrestrial birds, ravens , peregrine falcons , some wrens and wagtails are common. The Ainu people inhabited the Kuril Islands from early times, although few records predate the 17th century. From the Kamakura period to the Muromachi period , there were Ezo (Ainu) people called Hinomoto from the Pacific coast of Hokkaido to the Kuril region, and Mr. Ando,

225-407: A principal component of the diet of many of the smaller marine mammals and birds along the chain. Fish : Further offshore, walleye pollock , Pacific cod , several species of flatfish are of the greatest commercial importance. During the 1980s, migratory Japanese sardine was one of the most abundant fish in the summer. Pinniped : The main pinnipeds were a significant object of harvest for

270-438: A rise in the demand of electricity, the local government is also upgrading a state-run geothermal power plant at Mount Baransky , an active volcano, where steam and hot water can be found. In 2022, a special economic zone was established on the Kuril islands with special tax regimes, exemption from corporate income tax, VAT with reduced customs duties for 20 years. It is an important part of Russian government's plan to develop

315-709: A volcanic archipelago administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Far East . The islands stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 mi) northeast from Hokkaido in Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the north Pacific Ocean . There are 56 islands and many minor islets. The Kuril Islands consist of the Greater Kuril Chain and, at

360-681: Is a left-lateral moving transform fault , the Ulakhan Fault originating from a triple junction in the Chersky Range . During the 1970s Japan was thought to be located on the Eurasian plate at a quadruple junction with the North American plate, the Pacific plate and the Philippines Plate. At that time the western boundary of the North American plate was drawn through southern Hokkaido . In

405-430: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Kurile Islands The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands ( / ˈ k ( j ) ʊər ɪ l , k j ʊ ˈ r iː l / ; Russian : Кури́льские острова́ , romanized : Kuril'skiye ostrova , IPA: [kʊˈrʲilʲskʲɪjə ɐstrɐˈva] ; Japanese : Kuriru rettō ( クリル列島 , "Kuril Islands") or Chishima rettō ( 千島列島 , "Thousand Islands") ) are

450-612: Is a subduction zone, where the Pacific plate subducts beneath the Okhotsk Plate. Many strong megathrust earthquakes occurred here, some of them among the largest on world record, including the Kamchatka earthquakes of 1737 (estimated M9.0~9.3) and 1952 (M9.0). Such strong megathrust earthquakes can also occur near the Kuril Islands , as the M8.3 earthquake of November 15, 2006, Hokkaido , as

495-538: Is occupied by a nesting bird. Several of the islands, including Kunashir and the Lesser Kuril Chain in the South Kurils, and the northern Kurils from Urup to Paramushir, have been recognised as Important Bird Areas (IBAs) by BirdLife International because they support populations of various threatened bird species, including many waterbirds , seabirds and waders . The composition of terrestrial species on

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540-556: Is taken up by rodents , many introduced in historical times. The largest southernmost and northernmost islands are inhabited by brown bear , foxes, and martens . Leopards once inhabited the islands. Some species of deer are found on the more southerly islands. It is claimed that a wild cat, the Kurilian Bobtail , originates from the Kuril Islands. The bobtail is due to the mutation of a dominant gene. The cat has been domesticated and exported to nearby Russia and bred there, becoming

585-680: Is the highest point in Sakhalin Oblast . Owing to their location along the Pacific shelf edge and the confluence of Okhotsk Sea gyre and the southward Oyashio Current , the Kuril islands are surrounded by waters that are among the most productive in the North Pacific, supporting a wide range and high abundance of marine life. Invertebrates : Extensive kelp beds surrounding almost every island provide crucial habitat for sea urchins , various mollusks and countless other invertebrates and their associated predators. Many species of squid provide

630-471: Is the primary occupation. The islands have strategic and economic value, in terms of fisheries and also mineral deposits of pyrite , sulfur , and various polymetallic ores . There are hopes that oil exploration will provide an economic boost to the islands. In 2014, construction workers built a pier and a breakwater in Kitovy Bay, central Iturup, where barges are a major means of transport, sailing between

675-1656: The Habomai rocks, together called the Northern Territories . In addition, the Japanese government claims that the Kuril Islands, other than the Northern Territories and South Karafuto, are undetermined areas under international law because the San Francisco Peace Treaty does not specify where they belong and the Soviet Union has not signed it. On 8 February 2017 the Russian government gave names to five previously unnamed Kuril islands in Sakhalin Oblast : Derevyanko Island (after Kuzma Derevyanko , 43°22′8″N 146°1′3″E  /  43.36889°N 146.01750°E  / 43.36889; 146.01750 ), Gnechko Island (after Alexey Gnechko , 43°48′5″N 146°52′1″E  /  43.80139°N 146.86694°E  / 43.80139; 146.86694 ), Gromyko Island (after Andrei Gromyko , 46°14′1″N 150°36′1″E  /  46.23361°N 150.60028°E  / 46.23361; 150.60028 ), Farkhutdinov Island (after Igor Farkhutdinov , 43°48′5″N 146°53′2″E  /  43.80139°N 146.88389°E  / 43.80139; 146.88389 ) and Shchetinina Island (after Anna Shchetinina , 46°13′7″N 150°34′6″E  /  46.21861°N 150.56833°E  / 46.21861; 150.56833 ). As of 2013 , 19,400 people inhabited

720-524: The Kamchatka-Kurile meadows and sparse forests , a larger ecoregion that extends onto the Kamchatka Peninsula and Commander Islands . Because of the generally smaller size and isolation of the central islands, few major terrestrial mammals have colonized these, though red and Arctic foxes were introduced for the sake of the fur trade in the 1880s. The bulk of the terrestrial mammal biomass

765-538: The Kuril islands in return for entering the Pacific War against the Japanese during World War II. In August 1945 the Soviet Union mounted an armed invasion of South Sakhalin at the cost of over 5,000 Soviet and Japanese lives. The Kuril Islands are split into three administrative districts ( raions ), each a part of Sakhalin Oblast : Japan maintains a claim to the three islands of Kunashir , Iturup , and Shikotan , and

810-467: The M W 7.1 ( M S 7.5 according to other sources) earthquake of May 27, 1995 in northern Sakhalin. The earthquake devastated the town of Neftegorsk , which was not rebuilt afterwards. Other notable intraplate earthquakes , such as the 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake and the 1993 Hokkaidō earthquake , have triggered tsunamis in the Sea of Japan. The boundary between Okhotsk microplate and Pacific plate

855-792: The Russian far east . The main Russian force stationed on the islands is the 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division , which has its headquarters in Goryachiye Klyuchi on the Iturup Island. There are also Border Guard Service troops stationed on the islands. In February 2011, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for substantial reinforcements of the Kuril Islands defences. Subsequently, in 2015, additional anti-aircraft missile systems Tor and Buk , coastal defence missile system Bastion , Kamov Ka-52 combat helicopters and one Varshavyanka project submarine came on defence of Kuril Islands. During

900-476: The subpolar oceanic climate of southwest Alaska much more than the hypercontinental climate of Manchuria and interior Siberia, as precipitation is heavy and permafrost completely absent. It is characterized by mild summers with only 1 to 3 months above 10 °C or 50 °F and cold, snowy, extremely windy winters below −3 °C or 26.6 °F, although usually above −10 °C or 14 °F. The chain ranges from temperate to sub-Arctic climate types, and

945-478: The true seals and Steller sea lions has been relatively insignificant on the Kuril islands proper. Since the 1960s there has been essentially no additional harvest and the pinniped populations in the Kuril islands appear to be fairly healthy and in some cases expanding. The notable exception is the now extinct Japanese sea lion , which was known to occasionally haul out on the Kuril islands. Sea otters : Sea otters were exploited very heavily for their pelts in

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990-575: The 1980s, the boundary of the North American plate was extended to the Japan Sea and the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line (I-STL) due to earthquakes occurring at the eastern edge of the Japan Sea. 1990s research supported a proposal of an Okhotsk microplate independent from the North American plate. The Southern boundary through I-STL was proposed by Peter Bird in 2003 and places Japan on

1035-449: The 19th century, as shown by 19th- and 20th-century whaling catch and sighting records. Seabirds : The Kuril islands are home to many millions of seabirds, including northern fulmars , tufted puffins , murres , kittiwakes , guillemots , auklets , petrels , gulls and cormorants . On many of the smaller islands in summer, where terrestrial predators are absent, virtually every possibly hummock, cliff niche or underneath of boulder

1080-656: The 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine it was reported that parts of the 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division were redeployed to Eastern Ukraine. While in Russian sources the islands are mentioned for the first time in 1646, the earliest detailed information about them was provided by the explorer Vladimir Atlasov in 1697. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Kuril Islands were explored by Danila Antsiferov , I. Kozyrevsky, Ivan Yevreinov , Fyodor Luzhin , Martin Spanberg , Adam Johann von Krusenstern , Vasily Golovnin , and Henry James Snow. The following table lists information on

1125-666: The Eastern edge of the Eurasian plate, meets the Okhotsk microplate, sometimes considered the Western edge of the North American plate . It is controversial whether the northern Honshu, Okhotsk and North American plate constitute separate blocks or plates. "A slightly better fit to data is obtained" when the proposed blocks, Honshu and Okhotsk, are independent of North America, so some studies make this an assumption of their analysis. The boundary

1170-738: The Ezo Sateshiku and Ezo Kanrei, was in charge of this ("Suwa Daimyojin Ekotoba"). It is said that when turmoil broke out on Ezogashima, he dispatched troops from Tsugaru. Its activities include the Kanto Gomensen, which calls itself the Ando Suigun, and is based in Jusanminato ("Kaisen Shikimoku"), supplying Japanese products to Ezo society and purchasing large quantities of northern products and shipping them nationwide. ("Thirteen Streets").The Matsumae clan,

1215-620: The Kuril Islands are known as the Chishima Islands ( Kanji : 千島列島 Chishima Rettō pronounced [tɕiɕima ɾeꜜttoː] , literally, 'Thousand Islands Archipelago'), also known as the Kuriru Islands ( Katakana : クリル列島 Kuriru Rettō [kɯɾiɾɯ ɾeꜜttoː] , literally, Kuril Archipelago ). Once the Russians reached the islands in the 18th century they found a pseudo-etymology from Russian kurit′ , курить 'to smoke' due to

1260-410: The Kuril Islands, of which 16,700 lived on the four disputed southern islands and 2,600 lived on Paramushir , the northernmost large island; the islands in between are uninhabited. These include ethnic Russians , Ukrainians , Belarusians , Tatars , Nivkhs , Oroch , Japanese and Ainus . Iturup Island is over 60% ethnically Ukrainian. Russian Orthodox Christianity is the main religion. Some of

1305-602: The Kuril islands is dominated by Asian mainland taxa via migration from Hokkaido and Sakhalin Islands and by Kamchatkan taxa from the North. While highly diverse, there is a relatively low level of endemism on a species level. The WWF divides the Kuril Islands into two ecoregions . The southern Kurils, along with southwestern Sakhalin, comprise the South Sakhalin-Kurile mixed forests ecoregion. The northern islands are part of

1350-541: The Kuril islands. The Ainu were required to adopt Japanese names, and ordered to cease religious practices such as animal sacrifice and the custom of tattooing. Although not compulsory, education was conducted in Japanese. Prior to Japanese colonization (in 1868) about 100 Ainu reportedly lived on the Kuril islands. In February 1945 the Yalta Agreement promised to the Soviet Union South Sakhalin and

1395-460: The M8.3 earthquake of September 26, 2003 and the M9.0 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off the coast of Honshu . GPS measurements and other studies show that the Okhotsk microplate is slowly rotating in a clockwise direction. Models indicate that it rotates 0.2 deg/Myr about a pole located north of Sakhalin . In 2011 a M w  9.0–9.1 undersea megathrust earthquake caused by the subduction of

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1440-644: The Okhotsk Plate. Other researchers have proposed a plate boundary that passed through Hokkaido during the Neogene . Under their proposal, northeastern Japan and western Hokkaido would have been part of the Eurasian plate in the Neogene. The boundary between Okhotsk microplate and Amurian microplate might be responsible for many strong earthquakes that occurred in the Sea of Japan as well as in Sakhalin Island, such as

1485-487: The bark Cape Horn Pigeon , of New Bedford and escorted it to Vladivostok , where it was detained for nearly two weeks. At the very end of the 19th century, the Japanese administration started the forced assimilation of the native Ainu people. Also at this time the Ainu were granted automatic Japanese citizenship, effectively denying them the status of an indigenous group. Many Japanese moved onto former Ainu lands, including

1530-683: The continual fumes and steam above the islands from volcanoes. The Kuril Islands form part of the ring of tectonic instability encircling the Pacific Ocean referred to as the Ring of Fire . The islands themselves are summits of stratovolcanoes that are a direct result of the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the Okhotsk Plate , which forms the Kuril Trench some 200 kilometres (124 mi) east of

1575-471: The cove and ships anchored offshore. A new road has been carved through the woods near Kurilsk, the island's biggest village, going to the site of Yuzhno-Kurilsk Mendeleyevo Airport . Gidrostroy, the Kurils' biggest business group with interests in fishing, construction and real estate, built its second fish processing factory on Iturup island in 2006, introducing a state-of-the-art conveyor system. To deal with

1620-472: The indigenous populations of the Kuril islands, both for food and materials such as skin and bone. The long-term fluctuations in the range and distribution of human settlements along the Kuril island presumably tracked the pinniped ranges. In historical times, fur seals were heavily exploited for their fur in the 19th and early 20th centuries and several of the largest reproductive rookeries, as on Raykoke island, were extirpated. In contrast, commercial harvest of

1665-409: The islands in 1643. Fedot Alekseyevich Popov sailed into the area c.  1649 . Russian Cossacks landed on Shumshu in 1711. American whaleships caught right whales off the islands between 1847 and 1892. Three of the ships were wrecked on the islands: two on Urup in 1855 and one on Makanrushi in 1856. In September 1892, north of Kunashir Island , a Russian schooner seized

1710-466: The islands include many kinds of beach and rocky shores, cliffs, wide rivers and fast gravelly streams, forests, grasslands, alpine tundra , crater lakes and peat bogs . The soils are generally productive, owing to the periodic influxes of volcanic ash and, in certain places, owing to significant enrichment by seabird guano . However, many of the steep, unconsolidated slopes are susceptible to landslides and newer volcanic activity can entirely denude

1755-403: The islands is generally severe, with long, cold, stormy winters and short and notoriously foggy summers. The average annual precipitation is 40 to 50 inches (1,020 to 1,270 mm), a large portion of which falls as snow. The Köppen climate classification of most of the Kurils is subarctic ( Dfc ), although Kunashir is humid continental ( Dfb ). However, the Kuril Islands' climate resembles

1800-639: The islands. The chain has around 100 volcanoes, some 40 of which are active, and many hot springs and fumaroles . There is frequent seismic activity , including a magnitude 8.5 earthquake in 1963 and one of magnitude 8.3 recorded on November 15, 2006 , which resulted in tsunami waves up to 1.5 metres (5 ft) reaching the California coast. Raikoke Island, near the centre of the archipelago, has an active volcano which erupted again in June 2019, with emissions reaching 13,000 m (42,651 ft). The climate on

1845-501: The main islands from north to south: Okhotsk Plate The Okhotsk microplate is a proposed minor tectonic plate covering the Kamchatka Peninsula , Magadan Oblast , and Sakhalin Island of Russia; Hokkaido , Kantō and Tōhoku regions of Japan; the Sea of Okhotsk , as well as the disputed Kuril Islands . Japan's principal fault system is the zone where the Amurian microplate ,

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1890-523: The southwest end, the parallel Lesser Kuril Chain . They cover an area of around 10,503.2 square kilometres (4,055.3 sq mi), with a population of roughly 20,000. The islands have been under Russian administration since their 1945 invasion by the Soviet Union near the end of World War II . Japan claims the four southernmost islands, including two of the three largest ( Iturup and Kunashir ), as part of its territory, as well as Shikotan and

1935-590: The unpopulated Habomai islets, which has led to the ongoing Kuril Islands dispute . The disputed islands are known in Japan as the country's "Northern Territories". The name Kuril originates from the autonym of the aboriginal Ainu , the islands' original inhabitants : kur , meaning 'man'. It may also be related to names for other islands that have traditionally been inhabited by the Ainu people , such as Kuyi or Kuye for Sakhalin and Kai for Hokkaidō . In Japanese ,

1980-418: The vegetative cover consequently ranges from tundra in the north to dense spruce and larch forests on the larger southern islands. The highest elevations on the islands are Alaid volcano (highest point: 2,339 m or 7,674 ft) on Atlasov Island at the northern end of the chain and Tyatya volcano (1,819 m or 5,968 ft) on Kunashir Island at the southern end. Landscape types and habitats on

2025-416: The villages are permanently occupied by Russian soldiers. Others are inhabited by civilians, who are mostly fishers, workers in fish factories, dockers, and social sphere workers (police, medics, teachers, etc.). Construction works on the islands have attracted migrant workers from the rest of Russia and other post-Soviet states . As of 2014 , there were only 8 inhabited islands out of a total of 56. Fishing

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