Pakistan’s New Island Is Flammable and Temporary

[n2doc]

By Ben Richmond


Just half an hour after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake shook Pakistan last Tuesday, a new island surfaced in ocean, roughly half a mile offshore. Even though the quake’s epicenter was 230 miles away, the seismic wave disturbed a pocket of pressurized gas, which erupted as a “mud volcano,” forcing the seafloor of fine sand, solid rock and mud up 60 to 70 feet above the water.

As residents along the coast came out to explore, they found stranded sea creatures that had found themselves suddenly be hundreds of feet from the very ocean they were swimming in a moment ago. Journalist Bahram Baloch told the BBC that island was covered in dying fish and he could hear the hiss of escaping gas. At the end of the first-hand account video below someone lights one of the vents on fire.

The escaping gas, which is probably methane, is proof that Pakistan’s newest island is above the ocean only temporarily. As the underground gas cools, compresses, or escapes, the crust will settle back down and collapse, and currents in the sea will wash the sediment away.


"It's a transient feature," Bill Barnhart, a research geophysicist with the US Geological Survey told National Geographic. "It will probably be gone within a couple of months. It's just a big pile of mud that was on the seafloor that got pushed up."

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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/pakistans-new-island-is-flammable-and-temporary

[gopiscrap]

1. Whoa: fascinating

I love geology, it's the only science I easily passed in college

[JimDandy]

2. Wonder if the water it displaced has affected the sea level

along that coast. Probably only by a miniscule amount, if any.

[Downwinder]

3. Natural fracking.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Pushed up by gas, not magma -- I wonder if this is unique, as far as we know.

It would certainly seem to require a really unusual combination of circumstances -- water a little deeper, and we'd never know about it.

[Victor_c3]

6. It was like that when I was in Iraq

The women and girls stayed inside the homes and looked at us (American Soldiers) while the boys and men would come outside and interact with us.