An island is born: Amazing pictures show Red Sea underwater volcanic eruption creating new land



Underwater volcanic activity has pushed an previously unseen island to the surface in a remote part of the Red Sea.

Fishermen witnessed spewing lava fountains reaching up to 90ft tall on December 19 near the group of islands known as the Zubair Group, off the west coast of Yemen.

Days later images released by NASA Earth Observatory show the underwater explosion seems to have created a new island in between the Rugged and Haycock islands.

Scroll down for the video



After: The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captures what appears to be a plume of smoke from a new island

Before: Haydock (right) and Rugged Island are seen from space in October 24 2007, in between them is an unbroken water surface

Running in a roughly northwest-southeast line, the Zubair islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a shield volcano.

It is not yet clear how big or if the landmass created will be a permanent fixture of the Zubair Group of islands.



After: Thick smoke can be seen from the new island which appears to be coming from a new island

A Nasa spokesman said: 'The Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite captured these high-resolution, natural-color images on December 23, 2011 , and October 24, 2007.

'The image from December 2011 shows an apparent island where there had previously been an unbroken water surface.

'A thick plume rises from the island, dark near the bottom and light near the top, perhaps a mixture of volcanic ash and water vapor.'

According to the NASA Earth Observatory website, the existing ten islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a shield volcano.



And as this region is part of the Red Sea Rift where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart and new ocean crust regularly forms, eruptions are not thought to be unheard of but because of the remote location, they are rarely discovered.

Nearby Jabal al-Tair volcanic island erupted unexpectedly in 2007, after 124 years of inactivity, killing 8 people, as well as the volcanoes of the Afar Triagle in Eritrea and Ethiopia and the volcanic fields of southern Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

An underwater eruption in Magma created a new Canary Island in November.

At just 70 metres from the surface the volcano and islanders are still trying to come up with a name for the new island.



It is quite close to El Hierro and geologists feared if it continued to erupt it could eventually meet up with the mainland.







New Canary Island: An underwater explosion offshore the southern coast of El Hierro island produced this extra landmass

EXPLOSIVE FACTS ABOUT UNDERWATER VOLCANOES

You may be surprised to learn that 75 per cent of all the lava that erupts every year comes from undersea volcanoes.

The surrounding water immediately cools it and a crust forms known as ‘pillow lava’.

There are over 5,000 known submarine volcanoes, but some are extremely difficult to find, even with today’s technology.

This is because geologists find them by listening for the tell-tale boiling water using hydrophones, but at extreme depths the pressure is too high for water to boil.

The Canary Islands are all volcanic in origin, but are not unique in this respect – the Hawaiian islands are also volcanoes that built up over time and breached the surface.

In hundreds of thousands of years it’ll get a new island called Lo’ihi, which is slowly forming off the south-east coast.

Right now it’s around 3,000 feet beneath the surface, but it’s already been causing trouble, producing frequent earthquakes.