NASA has released images of a vanishing “ghost island” in the Caspian Sea, lying between Europe and Asia.
Captured from its Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites, the series of images showed the island’s appearance, on February 14, 2023, and then its near-complete disappearance on Christmas Day 2024.
The Kumani Bank mud volcano, also known as Chigil-Deiz, is located around 20 kilometres off the eastern coast of Azerbaijan and as a result of an eruption in 2023, the island formed.
Currently, there isn’t much understanding of mud volcanoes.
However, what experts do know is that they occur in areas where subsurface layers of fluidised sediments, including silt and clar are pressurised by tectonic activity, such as near the boundaires of the Earth’s crustal plates or by the buildup of hydrocarbon gases.
The pressurised sediment is then pushed upward, eurpting at the surface which then creates mounds of mud. Mud volcano eruptions can be a danger as they can sometimes throw out flammable gasses and even pillars of flame.
NASA said that “these features may not be unqiue to this planet; scientist think that some muddy mounds in the northern lowlands of Mars may have formed when gas-and liquid-rich sediments spewed out to the surface.”
Mud volcano specialist Dr. Mark Tingay of the University of Adelaide spoke to The Watchers, giving more detail about how the islands are formed.
He said: “These eruptions are short, often lasting minutes to hours, but incredibly violent, realeasing over 1 million cubic metres of mud.”
It’s not the first time the Kumani Bank has created an island. According to NASA, an island was first formed in May 1861, measuring and just 87 metres across, sitting 3.5 metres above the sea.
The following year it eroded, andl the most powerful eruption that took place in 1950 created an island that was six metres high and 700 metres wide.
The space agency shared that Azerbaijan has an exceptionally high concentration of mud volcances due to lying where the Arbaian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide.
However, islands which are formed from the mud erosions tend to disappear within months and nearly always within two years due to the weak and muddy compostion of the material that forms the island.
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