An Ethiopian volcano erupted on Sunday for the first time in at least 12,000 years, sending a cloud of ash and smoke pouring northeast across the Red Sea.
Heyli Gubbi, a volcano in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, erupted on November 23 at around 8:30 a.m. UTC (3:30 a.m. ET). By 8pm UTC (3pm ET), the explosive phase of the eruption had ceased, according to France’s Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC).
This is the first time that Hairi Gubbi is known to have erupted during the Holocene, the current geological epoch that began at the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago. Generally, if a volcano did not erupt during the Holocene, it is considered extinct.
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However, the area where this volcano is located is so little studied that past eruptions may have gone unnoticed.
Heyli Gubbi is the southernmost volcano of the Erta Ale Mountains, a chain of volcanoes in the Afar region. This range is part of the East African Rift, where the major plate that covers most of Africa is split in two. Although Heili Gubbi has been dormant for thousands of years, the volcano Erta Ale, which gives the mountain range its name, has been continuously active since at least 1967.
“Even if there hasn’t been an eruption for 1,000 or 10,000 years, as long as the conditions for magma to form remain, a volcano can still erupt,” Ariana Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University, told Scientific American.
A cloud of volcanic ash from the eruption reached a height of at least 45,000 feet (13,700 meters) and initially blew northeast over Yemen and Oman. Throughout Monday (November 24), the plume continued northeast, across northern India and into parts of China.
The VAAC in Toulouse detected the plume via satellite and issued several updates on its progress before transferring responsibility for issuing advisories to the Tokyo VAAC on Monday night. A satellite captured footage of the eruption from space.
No casualties were reported, but one local official expressed concern about the impact of the eruption on farmers and livestock in the area.
“So far there has been no loss of life or livestock, but many villages have been covered in ash, leaving animals with little to eat,” local administrator Mohamed Said told The Associated Press.
Ahmed Abdellah, a resident of the nearby village of Afderah, told The Associated Press that the eruption “felt like a bomb suddenly being thrown with smoke and ash.”
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