[Rockhounds] Largest Underwater Eruption Ever Recorded Gives Birth to Massive New Volcano

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

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
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00809-x>.

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
<https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mysterious-seismic-wave-rumbled-earth-and-scientists-can-t-explain-it>;
but it didn't take long to figure out that a volcanic event had occurred,
the likes of which had never been seen before
<https://www.sciencealert.com/we-just-got-a-lead-in-the-mysterious-case-of-a-massive-earth-shaking-seismic-wave>
.

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 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoro_Islands> 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.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-largest-underwater-volcanic-eruption-ever-recorded-gave-birth-to-a-new-volcano