Elevation maps in 2014 and 2019 reveal the new volcano. (Feuillet et al., Nature Geoscience, 2021)NATURE

Largest Underwater Eruption Ever Recorded Gives Birth to Massive New Volcano

MICHELLE STARR

A huge seismic event that started in May of 2018 and was felt across the entire globe has officially given birth to a new underwater volcano.

Off the eastern coast of the island of Mayotte, a gigantic new feature rises 820 meters (2,690 feet) from the seafloor, a prominence that hadn’t been there prior to an earthquake that rocked the island in May 2018.

“This is the largest active submarine eruption ever documented,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

The new feature, thought to be part of a tectonic structure between the East African and Madagascar rifts, is helping scientists understand deep Earth processes about which we know relatively little.

The seismic rumbles of the ongoing event started on 10 May 2018. Just a few days later, on 15 May, a magnitude 5.8 quake struck, rocking the nearby island. Initially, scientists were perplexed; but it didn’t take long to figure out that a volcanic event had occurred, the likes of which had never been seen before.

The signals pointed to a location around 50 kilometers from the Eastern coast of Mayotte, a French territory and part of the volcanic Comoros archipelago sandwiched between the Eastern coast of Africa and the Northern tip of Madagascar.

So a number of French governmental institutions sent a research team to check it out; there, sure enough, was an undersea mountain that hadn’t been there before.

Led by geophysicist Nathalie Feuillet of the University of Paris in France, the scientists have now described their findings in a new paper…..more here

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