Natural hazards and environment of Mount Ararat

The earthquake and rockfall of 1840

The worst natural disaster recorded on the mountain came from an earthquake. James Bryce, who visited the site in 1876, gives the fullest account. Towards sunset on 20 June 1840 (Old Style), a sudden shock “accompanied by a subterranean roar” threw down the houses of Arguri, a village of about two hundred houses at the mouth of the great chasm on the north-eastern side. At the same moment it detached “enormous masses of rock with their superjacent ice” from the cliffs around the chasm. The falling rock buried the village, the monastery of St Jacob and a Kurdish encampment on the pastures above. According to Bryce, “not a soul survived”. A few villagers who happened to be away escaped.

The disaster came in two stages. Four days later, the snow and ice thrown into the glen melted suddenly and formed a torrent of water and mud. It swept down the stream bed and far out into the Aras plain, carrying huge blocks and covering the ground for miles with mud and gravel. Bryce reports that the shocks were felt as far as Tiflis, the Caspian and Lake Urmia. Reports in Europe at the time spoke of an eruption. Bryce found no foundation for them: the dust of the rockfall was probably mistaken for smoke. Thirty-seven years later he could still see fresh fracture marks on the cliffs.

The event is also recorded in the appendix to the 1846 English edition of Friedrich Parrot’s book and in the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia. The geology of the chasm is described on geology and nature.

Is the volcano a hazard?

Bryce found “no record … of any eruption in historical times”. Stories in Armenian historians of mountains emitting fire, such as one dated A.D. 441, are too vague to point to Ararat. He also rejected a single German traveller’s claim of smoke and flames in 1785. Official Turkish sources today call the summit a dormant volcanic cone. “Dormant” is a classification, not a forecast. This reference has not been able to check a volcanological database, which returned an access error, so it makes no statement about the probability of future activity (see risk language).

Ice and snow

The summit cap and the glaciers are real hazards of terrain. On the north-western side, Parrot’s party had to cut steps in steep glacier ice in 1829. Bryce noted that the ice slopes there are occasionally steep enough to need step cutting and that crevasses occur. The glacier ice has been shrinking: the U.S. Geological Survey measured a fall in glacier area from 8.9 km² in 1977 to 5.3 km² in 2013. Shrinking ice changes the surface but does not make it predictable (see snow and ice).

Weather

The mountain’s weather can change within hours. Bryce described cloud forming around the top on most summer and autumn days, a few hours after sunrise. Parrot met snow, a cold, humid west wind and thick mist on the summit of Little Ararat in late October 1829. The official station series for Ağrı records a fastest wind of 46.3 m/s, on 9 April 2009, and temperatures down to −45.6 °C. Those figures come from a station in the provincial centre, not from the mountain (see climate and weather).

Scarce water

A less dramatic hazard is dryness. Bryce describes streams from the snows vanishing into loose volcanic ground and the mountain as “painfully dry throughout”. In autumn he met “scarcely a brook and rarely even a spring”. The Ağrı Governorship’s outline of the southern approach notes that water is taken on at the village of Eli before the long walk to the first camp.

Plants

Bryce described the zones of plant life as he saw them in September 1876, mainly on the north-eastern side:

• Lower slopes. A steppe vegetation “almost of the desert type” of dwarf, often prickly shrubs and tufts of grass. He names Dactylis littoralis, on which a cochineal insect lives. Parrot also described how the cochineal dye was gathered.
• Middle zone, about 5,000 to 11,000 or 12,000 feet. Greener pasture than on most Armenian mountains, kept green by the nearby snows and by dew and showers. Bryce passed through thickets of rose bushes here.
• Upper slopes. Bare gravel and rock, with a few hardy species creeping up to the snow line.

Trees are nearly absent. Parrot found walnut, apricot, willow and poplar growing at about 6,000 feet at St James’s monastery, where there was soil and water. He saw birches still growing at about 7,800 feet at the foot of Little Ararat. Bryce saw no coniferous tree anywhere. Among alpine plants Bryce found species of Gentiana, Campanula, Saxifraga, Draba and Cerastium, one Cerastium growing as high as about 14,000 feet. He thought the flora scanty overall, as on many dry volcanic mountains, with few mosses and almost no ferns.

Animals

Bryce’s list of wild animals is short and, by his own account, partly second-hand:

• on the upper crags, the ibex or wild goat (“it is not quite clear which”) and the wild sheep;
• a small fox seen on the snow at about 15,000 feet;
• lower down, wolves and lynxes, and wild pigs in the Aras marshes;
• few birds apart from vultures and hawks, and many lizards and scorpions on the lowest slopes.

He dismissed the botanist Tournefort’s report of tigers: nobody had believed it, and they may have been wild cats or leopards. These observations are more than 140 years old. They are not a current survey of wildlife, which this reference has not been able to consult.

Protected status

According to GoTürkiye, Mount Ararat was declared a national park in 2004. In Türkiye national parks fall under the General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks (DKMP) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The sources consulted for this page do not give the park’s boundaries or rules. The Ağrı Governorship states that climbs of Ağrı and Little Ağrı are subject to permission. Who does what is set out on who administers Mount Ararat.

Sources

1. James Bryce, Transcaucasia and Ararat, 3rd ed., London: Macmillan, 1878, ch. VI pp. 221–241. Internet Archive. Read 25 September 2026.
2. Friedrich Parrot, Journey to Ararat, translated by W. D. Cooley, New York: Harper and Bros., 1846, ch. VI, VIII, X, XII and the appendix on the fall of 1840. Internet Archive. Read 25 September 2026.
3. GoTürkiye, Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı) in Ağrı. Checked 14 September 2026.
4. Ağrı Valiliği, Ağrı Dağı (page dated 14.09.2020). Checked 14 September 2026.
5. USGS EROS Center, RBV Images Mount Ararat. Checked 14 September 2026.
6. Meteoroloji Genel Müdürlüğü, statistics page for Ağrı, 1940–2025. Read 25 September 2026.
7. T.C. Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı, Doğa Koruma ve Milli Parklar Genel Müdürlüğü. Checked 25 September 2026.
8. «Арарат, горы», Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона (1890–1907). Wikisource. Read 14 September 2026.