New Baby Volcano Rises Up from Seafloor Engulfs Older Nearby Volcano

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A seafloor baby volcano continues to erupt in a outlying part of the Pacific Ocean as images from space show the new volcano has swallowed up it’s neighbor. A baby volcano rose from the sea on November 20, about 620 miles south of Tokyo in the Bonin Islands. The volcano rose on the western edge of the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a place where there’s seismic activity. The baby volcano has been named Niijima. The volcano has been boiling the sea and spewing steam, ash and lava fragments into the air.

The new volcano was thought to have slipped back into the ocean, but the black cone shaped baby volcano that grew just kept growing offshore a larger volcanic island called Nishino-shima. On March 30,2014 satellite images were taken by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, and it shows that the baby volcano Niijima has overtaken Nishino-shima.

  

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Together, the conjoined islands measure about 3,280 feet across, officials with NASA’s Earth Observatory said. The landmass has also tripled in height since December, now rising more than 196 feet above sea level. The massive seafloor submarine volcano hasn’t erupted since a major outpouring in 1973 to 1974, according to the Japanese Coast Guard. The new landmass has a constant lava flow towards the southern portion of the new island with plumes of ash rising continuously.

“The intermittent, pulsing shape of the cloud stream might be a reflection of the volcanic eruption itself,” according to officials with NASA’s Earth Observatory wrote. “Strombolian explosions are essentially bubbles of lava and gas rising from Earth’s interior in pulses. Underwater, sediment appears to be stirred up in a green plume that stretches eastward from the island.”

image credit: planetdiary.com