Just recently, a new island in the Pacific Ocean surfaced.
The NASA Earth Observatory has discovered a brand-new island in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
This young piece of land emerged from a seafloor ridge that was home to the greatest number of underwater volcanoes on the globe.
The undersea mountain, which is referred to as the Home Reef seamount, extends between New Zealand and Tonga.
According to a press statement from the Earth Observatory, one of those volcanoes erupted last month, bursting with lava that poured into the nearby ocean and
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billowed enormous plumes of ashy smoke into the air.A brand-new island appeared eleven hours later amid the shimmering heat of the eruption that was subsiding.
And happily, the island's newfound splendour was captured in full by NASA's Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) in a stunning, natural-color image.
The island was believed to be around 43,000 square feet, or one acre, in size and 33 above sea level based on preliminary measurements taken on September 14.a
But by September 20, the tiny island's had doubled, and it had reached approximately 260,000 square feet, or six acres.
Sadly, NASA has warned that islands formed by underwater volcanoes often don't last very long, so this little guy probably won't be around for very long.
However, there are occasional exceptions, such as one island formed in 1995 from the neighbouring Late'iki Volcano that endured for a full 25 years,
despite being a short period of time in geological terms.