A NASA satellite has spotted a newly formed island off the coast of Japan that experienced a fiery birth in late October.
Gasket NASA/United States Geological Survey Satellite Landsat-9 saw the island emerging from the sea off the island of Iwo Jima, part of the volcanic island archipelago south of Japan, on November 3.
The island was born 1,200 kilometers south of Tokyo, between 12:20 p.m. and 12:35 p.m. local time on October 30, when extremely hot magma fell into the ocean and exploded, creating chunks of rock several feet long and more than 160 feet (50 meters) in the air, according to the University of Tokyo.
“According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the eruption appears to have started on October 21, 2023,” wrote researchers from the University of Tokyo. “The location of this eruption is almost the same as the 2022 eruption and is believed to indicate the resumption of magmatic activity on Iwo Jima.”
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The underwater eruptions broke the ocean surface in two places in the form of explosions at the southern tip of Iwo Jima, and rocks gathered north of these explosions. This growing pile of rubble eventually formed a 330-foot (100-meter) wide island, about 800 meters (1 kilometer) from Iwo Jima, sitting in discolored water littered with highly porous rocks called pumice.
An extremely light rock, pumice is created when lava with a very high water and gas content is released from a volcano. As gas bubbles escape from this lava, it becomes “frothy,” cooling and hardening to form a bubble-filled rock.
Landsat-9 viewed the island from his position 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth on November 3, and this image was compared to observations of the region collected by the same satellite on October 18 in which the island was not present.
The birth of the island was observed by a craft much closer to home when a plane belonging to the Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, was the first stage of an underwater eruption in the southern part of the Izu-Ogasawara arc – an oceanic trench in the region. Western Pacific Ocean.
The site of the new island has been a hotbed of underwater steam and lava eruptions in recent years, Toyko University researchers said, adding that it is one of the fastest growing caldera volcanoes – a large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses. – in the world.