Ethiopian Volcano Erupts for First Time in Nearly 12K Years of Records

The plume from the Hayli Gubbi volcano drifted east over the Arabian Sea and extended roughly 2,200 miles

            The Hayli Gubbi volcano in the rural northeast of Ethiopia erupted November 23.
          Afar Communication Bureau via Facebook
        
      
    

    A volcano in northern Ethiopia erupted Sunday, marking its first known eruption in 12,000 years. The volcano, called Hayli Gubbi, spewed ash up to nine miles into the air for several days, leading to flight cancellations and spreading a layer of dust across nearby communities.

Hayli Gubbi is a shield volcano, a type of volcano known for very broad, gentle slopes and oozing lava flows. Named because their shape resembles a warrior’s shield lying flat, these volcanoes are the largest on Earth and are built by repeated lava flows. It’s unusual for a shield volcano to produce such a large expulsion of ash.

“To see a big eruption column, like a big umbrella cloud, is really rare in this area,” Juliet Biggs, an Earth scientist at the University of Bristol in England, tells Stephanie Pappas at Scientific American.No casualties have been reported, but medical teams were dispatched this week to affected neighborhoods, Abedella Mussa, a local health official, tells the Associated Press’ Amanuel Gebremedhin Birhane and Rajesh Roy.

“While no human lives and livestock have been lost so far, many villages have been covered in ash, and as a result, their animals have little to eat,” Mohammed Seid, a local administrator, tells Samuel Getachew at the Associated Press.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program has no record of any eruptions of Hayli Gubbi during the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began at the end of the last ice age, about 11,700 years ago.

But Biggs tells Scientific American that satellite data has hinted at potential volcanic activity more recently. “I would be really surprised if [more than 12,000 years ago] really is the last eruption date,” she says to the publication. Situated in the rural northeast of Ethiopia, Hayli Gubbi has not been deeply studied, and the surrounding area is only sparsely populated. Still, the recent eruption marks the first documented belch from the volcano in millennia.

Ethiopia's Hayli Gubbi erupts for 1st time in recorded history

The Afar region is prone to earthquakes, because it is situated along an active rift. Ahmed Abdela, a resident, tells the Associated Press he heard a loud sound when the eruption started.

“It felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown, with smoke and ash,” he says.

Both Air India and Akasa Air canceled flights in the area as the plume from the volcano drifted into Asia. The ash cloud blew east over the Arabian Sea and extended more than 2,200 miles, according to images from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite on November 24.

The volcano sits in a region called the East African Rift System. The two plates that create this rift are moving about 0.4 to 0.6 inches apart each year, Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University, tells Scientific American. This ongoing shift contributed to the eruption. Hayli Gubbi has seemingly been dormant for thousands of years, but the Erta Ale volcano, which sits about seven miles away, emitted plumes in July.

“So long as there are still the conditions for magma to form, a volcano can still have an eruption, even if it hasn’t had one in 1,000 years, 10,000 years,” Soldati adds.

Ethiopian Volcano Erupts for First Time in Nearly 12K Years of Records

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