Tuya Butte facts for kids

Tuya Butte is a special type of volcano found in north-central British Columbia, Canada. It's known as a "tuya" (pronounced TOO-yah), which is a volcano that erupted under a thick ice sheet or glacier. Tuya Butte is located in the Tuya Range.

This unique mountain was the very first tuya ever studied by scientists. Because of its importance, its name, "tuya," is now used by volcanologists (scientists who study volcanoes) all over the world to describe this kind of landform.

Tuya Butte is so special that the Tuya Mountains Provincial Park was created to protect it. This park is found north of Tuya Lake and south of the Jennings River, close to the border with the Yukon Territory. Experts consider Tuya Butte one of the best examples of a tuya outside of places like Iceland and Antarctica.

A Canadian volcanologist named Bill Mathews gave Tuya Butte its name. He named it after the nearby Tuya Lake and Butte Lake. The word tuya might even come from a word used by the Tahltan First Nation people.

How Tuya Butte Formed

Tuya Butte is part of a larger area called the Tuya volcanic field. This field has many different kinds of volcanoes, including tuyas, small shield volcanoes, and lava flows. These volcanoes formed a long time ago, during the Pleistocene and Holocene periods.

Volcanoes and Plate Tectonics

The Tuya Volcanic Field is part of a much bigger chain of volcanoes called the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province. This huge volcanic area stretches from Prince Rupert all the way into the Yukon and near the Alaska border. It formed because the North American Plate is slowly pulling apart, while the Pacific Plate is sliding northward. This movement creates cracks in the Earth's crust, allowing magma to rise and form volcanoes.

Erupting Under Ice

Tuya Butte formed in a very interesting way. Imagine a huge sheet of ice, like a giant glacier, covering the land. Magma, which is hot, melted rock from deep inside the Earth, pushed its way up through this ice sheet.

As the magma rose, it melted a vertical tunnel through the ice. The hot magma then cooled down inside this icy tunnel. It formed a large, solid block of rock. The top of this block flattened out because of gravity.

The volcano is made of special rocks called hyaloclastite and pillow lava. These rocks form when lava cools very quickly underwater or under ice. The fact that Tuya Butte doesn't show much damage from glaciers suggests it erupted when the ice sheet was still very thick during the Pleistocene Ice Age.

No Obvious Crater

Unlike many volcanoes that have a clear crater at the top, Tuya Butte doesn't have one. This suggests that the magma might have come out of a long crack in the ground, called a fissure vent, instead of a single round opening. Scientists think the main vent might have been near a large bowl-shaped area on the north side of the mountain.

Other volcanoes that formed under ice, similar to Tuya Butte, can be found in places like the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt in British Columbia.