New island!

[Boerseun]

According to a few eyewitnesses, the Earth gave birth near Tonga!

 

Welcome to the planet, new baby island dude!

 

Anybody know anything more about this?

[Chacmool]

Welcome to the planet, new baby island dude!

Very welcome indeed to the new island! However, what makes you think it's a "dude"? For example, in Spanish the gender of an island (una isla) is FEMALE.

[Boerseun]

...or dudette, then. :teeth:

[Qfwfq]

For example, in Spanish the gender of an island (una isla) is FEMALE.

German is even more preverse:

 

"Odd language, in which a young woman has no sex and a cabbage does!" (Mark Twain, just after a lesson in basic German.)

[Jay-qu]

im gonna buy an island :teeth:

 

you can all come live on it :beer:

[Qfwfq]

Off the coasts of Antarctica?

:teeth:

[moo]

im gonna buy an island :)

 

you can all come live on it :)

Hope it's a big one, there's over 4k members here... :cup:

 

moo

[Turtle]

According to a few eyewitnesses, the Earth gave birth near Tonga!

 

Welcome to the planet, new baby island dude!

 

Anybody know anything more about this?

 

I know some general things about birthin' ocean islands. ;) No, really. 0.o The good news is the birth was witnessed for our elucidation; the bad news is such births have an extremely high mortality rate. The material that has surfaced is fractured and fractious and no match for the wave action; it is worn away quickly to below the wave level during non-eruptive periods. This presents a very real danger to shipping as the island is there one month, and not in another. Underwater vents may erupt in this periodic manner over long stretches of time and never build a substantial island. Then again, supervolcanoes have the same humble birth. :) :D

[pgrmdave]

Great quote from the skipper:

 

"You might have heard about the sailor's superstition that you should 'never leave on a Friday'. Well, we did and the sea turned to stone, it is hard to get a stronger sign than that," skipper Frederik Fransson said.

[apple2006]

Great quote from the skipper:

:confused:

[LJP07]

Was it a "new island"? ( as it might have always been there ), or was it already there and just "newly discovered"? Just nitpicking :confused:

[CraigD]

Was it a "new island"? ( as it might have always been there ), or was it already there and just "newly discovered"?

”New”, as in you could have sailed a boat over the place it now is a few months ago, I’m pretty sure. The Metis Shoal (about 19°10’ S 175°32’ W), is a pretty heavily trafficked patch of ocean, largely because it’s full of shallow water reefs full of yummy fish. It’s not a place where a steaming, spewing, mile-wide island can rise from the sea without somebody noticing before too long. Also, given that the entire surface of the Earth has been photographed to a resolution of less than 10 meters, there simply are no old undiscovered islands, though arguable there are some that have never been visited by human beings.

 

If you point your Google Earth at the Metis Shoal and zoom out to an altitude of about 4000 km or so, you’ll notice that vicinity of Tonga is full or named seamounts – undersea prominences not quite high enough to be islands – following a roughly straight line from Samoa to New Zealand. To the best of my knowledge, they’re all volcanic, so it’s not surprising one put on a little “volcanic growth spurt” and poked its head up above sea level.

 

As Turtle mentions, these “ephemeral islands” don’t tend to last long. The Global Volcanism Program’s website has this 2/19/1968 photo of waves just beginning to cover a small island that appeared only a few months earlier. The site says “Most recently, an eruption in 1995 produced a laca dome that built up to 43 m above sea level” – looks like the folk at GVP need to update their data!