Ethiopian Volcano That Was Dormant for 12,000 Years Just Exploded— Its Ash Is Spreading Worldwide

Scientists had been expecting earthquakes in this region, but an eruption like this was totally unanticipated.

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Volcanic eruption spewing enormous plumes of gas and ash to billow into the skies (Representative Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Henri Laduc)

Ethiopia’s Hayli Gubbi volcano had been quiet for the past 12,000 years. For all these centuries, it sat dormant with its hollow, crater-shaped mouth etched into the Danakil Depression, one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world. But on Sunday, November 23, the ground blew off, and the long-dormant volcano exploded in a sudden awakening. Towering plumes of ash fizzled from its mouth, billowing across the Red Sea towards Yemen, Oman, and India. The screens of the media outlets and news stations are buzzing with raging footage of Hayli Gubbi’s thunderous outbreak, as also reported by Scientific American.

Representative Image Source: Pexels | Dipanker Layek

Even though scientists had long been expecting an earthquake from this region, an eruption was totally unexpected. Due to the initial confusion, they had been preparing to witness some seismic activities in the region, but then the volcano rose behind their backs and burst like an undetected time bomb. The cause behind this sudden eruption is being attributed to Hayli Gubbi’s unique geology and geometry. Being the southernmost volcano of the Erta Ale Range, it is located in one of the most active geological zones in the world, the Afar triangle. The Afar triangle is a “triple junction” that lies on the intersection of the Arabian, African, and Somali tectonic plates. A recent study showed that while the plates started pulling apart about 28 million years ago, they never stopped.

Molten droplet dripping into molten magma of Earth's mantle (Representative Image Source: Pexels | Tomas Malik)

The rift continues to widen, and if it keeps on widening, eventually the Arabian Sea and rift valley will become a new ocean, as Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University, reflected. As the rift widens, the crust becomes thinner and thinner, causing the hot rocks to rise from the mantle to the surface and start melting into magma. As Steven Anderson explains in TED-Ed, this pressure exerted by the upper crust rock, coupled with the pressure building up in the gassy bubbles of magma, triggers immense stress on the surface rock, just like a soda bottle.

However, unlike soda, the ground doesn’t remain stable for too long. It explodes. Hayli Gubbi shot plumes of ash and lava nine miles into the sky, a height where intercontinental aircraft fly. Images gathered from satellites show a deluge of lava and menacing plumes of smoke burped out from the volcano’s mouth, raging into the sky. Juliet Biggs, an earth scientist from England, contemplated a thing that seemed to be unusual. Being a “shield volcano,” Hayli Gubbi should have spouted out just lava, but all this ash was unforeseen. “To see a big eruption column, like a big umbrella cloud, is really rare in this area,” said Biggs.

Soldati, on the other hand, believes that so long as there are still the conditions for magma to form, the volcano can still erupt, even if it hasn’t erupted in the past 1,000 or even 10,000 years. And although scientists didn’t expect a full-blown eruption, Biggs and her colleagues had some hints that an eruption like this could unfold sometime. The ground near Hayli Gubbi had risen to a few centimeters. White puffy clouds had been materializing out of nowhere.

A representative image of an underwater volcanic eruption. (Image Source: Getty Images | Dana Stephenson) — Puffy white clouds billow from a volcanic eruption. (Representative Image Source: Getty Images | Dana Stephenson)

Plus, satellite imagery from a nearby volcano and the world’s longest-existing lava lake, named Erta Ale, had revealed that the intrusion of magma had pushed more than 18 miles below the surface, under Hayli Gubbi and beyond. The region’s Dabbahi volcano also erupted in 2005 and set off a string of earthquakes, creating a 1650-foot-long fissure, with ash cloaking the skies for days and days, IFLScience noted. Hayli Gubbi seems to be even more furious than these volcanoes. The intensity of Hayli Gubbi’s lava flows is now making scientists rethink what they think is “dormant.”

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