Brand New Volcanic Island Seen Growing From Space

A whole new island pushed to the ocean surface off the coast of Japan has been growing since its birth.

The tiny island—named Niijima, or "new island" in Japanese, popped up just off the southern shores of Iwo Jima in late October, and can be seen in NASA images to have gained in size in the weeks since.

A new image of the island was snapped by the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on November 27, showing that the volcanic activity beneath the Earth's crust is still bubbling away.

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The island was initially spotted from space by the NASA/U.S. Geological Survey satellite Landsat-9 on November 3, in the wake of an undersea volcano that started erupting at the end of October. The island is situated about a mile off the coast of Iwo Jima, which itself is about 750 miles south of Tokyo.

As the undersea volcano erupted, hot magma and rock were flung up onto the seafloor, building up into the new island, which burst forth from the waves surrounded by floating rocks of porous volcanic pumice.

"On October 30, 2023, from around 12:20-12:35, an underwater eruption off the coast of Iwo Jima was observed from a Mainichi Shimbun aircraft," reads a translated statement from The University of Tokyo.

"Immediately north of the eruption site, a new island with a diameter of approximately 100m was formed, consisting mainly of rock blocks, but no clear crater topography was observed on the surface," it says, before going on to observe that the island's concentric structure, floating pumice and discolored seawater indicate a magma eruption.

"Based on the observation of the formation of Niijima and the spread of pumice, it was estimated that the eruption had begun recently, but according to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the eruption appears to have started on October 21, 2023," the statement says.

Since its birth, the island has been seen to have carried on growing, as visible in the newer image from Sentinel-2. It also continues to show signs of volcanic activity, with the Japanese Coast Guard sharing footage to X, formerly Twitter, of the island being coated with explosions of steam and smoke as the volcano erupted once more.

The island's fate will depend on the type of rock it's made up of, and how active the volcano will continue to be. If it's made of hardened lava, it may stick around, while if it's composed of lighter, more crumbly rock, it could soon wash away into the sea.

It's unclear how long the volcano that formed the island will continue its active period for, as it's very difficult for volcanologists to accurately predict eruptions.

"A volcanologist, or volcanology team in an observatory can forecast the relative likelihood of eruptions, but this is dependent on a deep knowledge of the volcano and a knowledge of how past events have escalated or been triggered," Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told Newsweek.

"In many cases suddenly erupting volcanoes may not have many past events with observational data, so that most forecasts are very imprecise," he said. "These methods are improving all the time, with application of machine learning etcetera, however, even with these advanced mathematical tools, we still need a long record of many events to 'train' such models. Most times, volcanologists use the information from seismicity, gas and temperature release—and especially changes in these from normal situations."

For now, however, Niijima is sticking around, and growing larger. It marks one of the newest formations of the notorious "Ring of Fire," an arc of underwater volcanoes stretching around the Pacific from the tip of South America, past North America, Japan, and all the way to New Zealand.

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