Canary Island volcano: A new island in the making? (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Rob Hugh-Jones
PRI's The World

An undersea volcano erupting just south of Spain's Canary Islands may be the beginnings of a new island, or an extension to an existing one. For some, it's a colourful spectacle - for others a major blow to their livelihood.

"It's angry today. Look at it go!" says fisherman Elio Morales Rodriguez in the village of La Restinga, on the south coast of El Hierro island.

"That green patch on the water is a dead zone," he says, looking out to sea. "It kills everything. No fishing, no dive schools, no tourists, just dead fish on the surface."

For more than a month, the underwater volcano has been erupting three miles to the south of El Hierro, the smallest of the seven Canary Islands, about 50km (30 miles) south-west of its nearest neighbour, La Gomera, and 100km (60 miles) from the most populous of the islands - Tenerife.

From about 60m below the sea, the so-called "submarine" volcano is spewing gases and burning lava, some of which is breaking the surface of the water.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15917740




Spelling police alert -- "What we're seeing on El Hierro is an active fracture zone, running more or less north-south. And that fracture zone acts as a channel for magma, moving from depth to the surface, in a structure that we describe as a "dyke" - it's like a vertical sheet of magma." Um, that should be a "dike".

[BeFree]

1. Uh oh

You do know what this means, right? Canary and the coal mine ring a bell? Ding-dong. <grin>

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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[Odin2005]

3. I doubt their magma chambers are connected.