THE sea bubbled and boiled, steam rose and rocks spat forth into the air. Slowly a mound began to emerge from the waves, and within days a new island was born. It might sound like something from the book of Genesis, but it is just how the world鈥檚 newest island emerged from the ocean.
On 9 August 2006, yachts sailing around Tonga reported sightings of a submarine volcanic eruption at Home Reef, south of Late Island. Three days later the crew of the Norwegian yacht Maiken caught sight of an island not found on any nautical chart. Approximately 1.5 kilometres across, it was capped by a huge plume of steam, and the sea for miles around was covered with floating rafts of pumice spewed out by the eruption.
By mid-October, eruptions on the island had ceased and its demise began. This is often the way with new islands: if the rock doesn鈥檛 have time to consolidate, waves quickly wear it away. By 8 December, when a New Zealand military plane took the last published photograph, Home Reef island had shrunk by more than half. 鈥淭here鈥檚 probably not that much left of it now except a bit of discoloured water,鈥� says David Pyle, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford.
Advertisement
Home Reef isn鈥檛 the first submarine volcano to break the surface: Surtsey famously did so off the south coast of Iceland in 1963, this time with enough oomph to become a permanent feature. It won鈥檛 be the last, either. Hiding less than 10 metres below the surface of the Mediterranean, 40 kilometres off the south coast of Sicily, is the spout of the submarine volcano Empedocles. The last time it erupted, in July 1831, it produced an island 4 square kilometres in area. The Italians (who named it Ferdinandea), French (脦le Julia), British (Graham Island) and Spanish all laid territorial claims to the new island. But by January 1832, before they could settle their dispute, the island was washed away.
Empedocles rumbled again in 2002, raising the possibility of another territorial dispute. So far there鈥檚 been no sign of it breaking the surface, but just in case Ferdinandea does re-emerge Italian divers have planted a flag on the volcano鈥檚 submerged summit.
