The institute wrote in its letter on Sunday that the volcano called Home Reef has been spewing lava since Sept. 10. The report revealed that 11 hours after the eruption of the volcano began, an island of four thousand square meters was formed 250 kilometers north of Tongatapu Island.
In the ten days that followed, the plot grew rapidly, eight times its initial surface area. It currently rises about fifteen meters above the water surface, and is 211 meters long and 218 meters wide.
It is not yet known if the island will survive. NASA has warned that plots of land created by underwater volcanoes are often short-lived.
Between 1984 and 2006, several islands formed after the eruption of the Hum Reef volcano. Some of them reached a height of seventy meters. However, these islands disappeared again later.
Tonga is located 2,300 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, and consists of about 170 islands. More than a quarter of the archipelago’s population of 107,000 live in the capital, Nuku’alofa.
During the month-long eruption of the Tonga-Hung Hapai volcano in early 2014 and 2015, a two-kilometre island was formed, which disappeared during another powerful eruption of the volcano in 2022.
As we have reported, nearly 700 earthquakes have been detected under the lake that formed above New Zealand’s Taupo crater in the recent period; And recently for the first time Readiness level has been raised In the case of the volcano, whose last eruption has not occurred in the last 5,000 years.
Cover image source: Getty Images
