They have been baptized as Sholan and Jadid and are part of the Zubair archipelago, made up of 10 volcanic islands and several rocks, south of the Red Sea, between the coast of Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The birth of these two new islands emerged in the Red Sea has been picked up by several satellites orbiting the Earth that have managed to capture the rapid and violent formation of these young volcanic islands .
The research, conducted by a team of scientists from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia) shows that the region in which these two islets are found is much more volcanically active than previously believed. The area is located precisely above an oceanic ridge that has been subjected to intense volcanic and seismic activity since the late 1970s.
“As the islands belong to Yemen and were beyond our reach to carry out field work, we decided to use satellite images as well as seismic data to study the formation of these islands, ” explains Sigurjon Jonsson, co-author of the study.
Thus, by combining high-resolution images from satellites together with data from sulfur dioxide emissions captured by ozone monitoring instruments, scientists discovered that the islets formed very quickly (the first took only 25 days) after the eruption. of the underwater volcano; later, both islands were fed by two magma-covered fractures.
It is quite difficult to observe the emergence of volcanic islands, since apart from the fact that they usually arise in remote areas of the planet, these phenomena usually occur at a depth of 3,000 or 4,000 meters and rarely enough magma accumulates that it ends up protruding to the surface .
“When magma spreads through the crust and reaches the surface, it generates a deformation that we can measure on neighboring islands using a technique called interferometry, based on data obtained by satellite radar. We combine these observations with simian activity to better analyze the entire volcanic process ”, explain Wenbin Xu and Joel Ruch, co-authors of the study.
Scientists have produced a three-dimensional model of the event, collected in the journal Nature Communications .
