• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

A New Baby Island Has Just Been Born In The Pacific Ocean

September 22, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

A new island has sprung up in a patch of the southwest Pacific Ocean riddled with underwater volcanoes, according to NASA Earth Observatory. 

It began with the eruption of an underwater volcano found in the Central Tonga Islands on September 10 – and within just eleven hours, a landmass emerged from the watery depths, created by oozing lava that had been cooled by the ocean waters and solidified.

Advertisement

Over the following days, lava continued to pour and the newly formed island grew. The island was 170 meters (558 feet) in diameter on September 16 and eventually swelled to 182 meters over the following two days. 

By September 20, the island had grown to cover 24,000 square meters (6 acres) with an elevation of 10 meters (33 feet). 

Sallite image showing the newly formed island in the Pacific Ocean with a plume of steam stemming from it.

An annotated version of the new satellite image. Image credit: Landsat 9/NASA/NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin,

The formation of the new island was captured through imagery taken by the Landsat 9 satellite on September 14. In this natural-color image, we see a vast plume of steam and ash drift away from the volcano. You can also see a cloud of discolored water growing around the landmass, created by the presence of superheated and acidic seawater containing volcanic rock and sulfur.

Advertisement

The new island can be found southwest of Late Island, northeast of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, and northwest of Mo‘unga‘one. This part of the Pacific is home to the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone, an area where three tectonic plates are slowly crashing together. 

All of this tectonic activity has endowed this part of the Pacific with a seafloor ridge that has the highest density of underwater volcanoes in the world. 

Sadly, the infant island might not stick around for long. Weathering and erosion from waves and currents can quickly degrade the volcanic rock, meaning this newly formed island often disappears quickly. 

Advertisement

Some new islands, however, do manage to survive. In 2014, an underwater volcano in this part of the Pacific erupted and forged the sizable island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. Although merely a baby, the island has already fostered a thriving ecosystem, complete with pink flowering vegetation, nesting sooty tern birds, and barn owls – much to the surprise of scientists.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Toshiba says detailed talks on buyouts meaningful only after option review
  2. Australia PM Morrison says trade talks with EU will take time
  3. Bitcoin attempts recovery as Evergrande-led selloff eases
  4. Jordanian King Abdullah’s property abroad not a secret – palace

Source Link: A New Baby Island Has Just Been Born In The Pacific Ocean

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version