Watching two new islands form in the Red Sea

The solid Earth changes very slowly, generally speaking—so slowly that short-lived and fast-changing creatures like ourselves can be forgiven for forgetting that it changes at all. It's hard to imagine the land we live on sitting beneath three kilometers of glacial ice or sitting under open ocean; it's like imagining a painting of a different place.

This is partly what makes volcanic islands so wild. When they erupt, the island changes quickly and obviously. And if you’re extremely lucky, you might even catch the birth of a new island. A place that had long been sea becomes land, and you can watch it happen—no CGI or imagination required. And we now have robotic eyes constantly scanning the globe from space, so we no longer rely on the luck of being in the right place at the right time to observe such an event.

In the Red Sea between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, there is a small chain of islands, called the Zubair Archipelago, with an interesting history. Just as Africa is slowly splitting apart along the volcanically active East African Rift, the Arabian Peninsula is breaking up with Africa along the Red Sea. In the 1700s and 1800s, the Zubair Archipelago hosted eruptions—the only recorded in the Red Sea—but they went quiet through the 20^th century. In 2007, they woke up, with an eruption popping on one of the islands.

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