Recently released photos from NASA showed the presence of an island that appeared in the Caspian Sea but almost entirely eroded away just a year later.
The island emerged from the Caspian Sea after “a mud volcano erupted in early 2023,” according to a report from the NASA Earth Observatory, but by the end of 2024, the island was almost completely gone.
The images released by the American space agency indeed showed an empty blue sea on Nov. 18, 2022, a few months before the eruption occurred.
By Feb. 14, 2023, the island appeared near the Kumani Bank mud volcano, with a long sediment plume extending away from the new land mass.
But on Dec. 25., the island was mostly gone.
“Powerful eruptions of the Kumani Bank mud volcano have produced similar transient islands several times since its first recorded eruption in 1861,” NASA noted.
The volcano is located some 15 miles off the eastern coast of Azerbaijan.
NASA captured the images with the OLI, which stands for Operational Land Imager, and OLI-2 mounted on satellites.
Have you ever heard of a mud volcano?
Mark Tingay, a geologist from the University of Adelaide quoted in the NASA report, said that mud volcanoes are “weird and wonderful features that remain largely understudied and little understood.”
NASA noted that the features can be as small as a few meters wide or even several kilometers long.
“Most are found in areas with active tectonics or high sedimentation rates,” the report continued. “These are places where subsurface pressure can build and force a mix of fluids, gases, and sediments to the surface.”
But mud volcanoes are not only found on our home planet.
“Scientists think that some muddy mounds in the northern lowlands of Mars may have formed when gas- and liquid-rich sediments spewed out to the surface,” NASA added.
In any case, here on earth, Azerbaijan has an unusually high concentration of mud volcanoes.
The nation and its eastern shore on the Caspian Sea, which is near the convergence zone between the Arabian and Eurasian plates, has seen more than 300 mud volcanoes tracked by scientists.
The features can nevertheless be dangerous and can spew hazardous materials.
Sometimes they even shoot flames, but it is unknown if the 2023 eruption resulting in the small island occurred with such violence.
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