An Ethiopian Shield Volcano Has Just Erupted, For The First Time In Thousands Of Years

The Hayli Gubbi shield volcano, thought to be dormant since almost the last ice age, has erupted, and the volcanic plume is reaching heights at which intercontinental aircraft fly.

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Hayli Gubbi is located in the Afar region of Ethiopia where the Arabian tectonic plate meets the Nubian and Somali parts of the African Plate, creating a triple junction. The Nubian and Somali plates are separating as the African Rift Valley splits the continent in two, which will eventually lead to part of east Africa becoming a separate continent.

Inevitably, this leads to a lot of volcanic activity. The Erta Ale volcano is continuously active, and boasts the world’s longest-existing lava lake in the world, dating to at least 1906.

The region’s Dabbahu Volcano erupted in 2005 and set off a string of earthquakes, creating a 500-meter (1,650-foot) long fissure, with ash darkening the skies of the region for days. However, at this early stage it looks like Hayli Gubbi’s eruption could be considerably larger.

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Hayli Gubbi is part of the Erta Ale range, and lies just 15 kilometers (9 miles) southeast of the active volcano. Fortunately, the Volcano Discovery website reports population in the area is very low, understandable when it's sometimes called the Gateway to Hell. While this is hampering information about the eruption, other than what can be obtained from satellites, it also means there are unlikely to be many casualties.

Hayli Gubbi’s geology clearly marks it as a volcano, but there is no record of it having erupted in recorded history. Some lava flows are over sediments 8,200 years old, but any eruption in that time appear to have been small enough to leave little record. Geological studies in the area are sparse, however, so more recent eruptions can’t be ruled out.

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The Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in Toulouse, France has released an alert to airplanes flying in the area. with some advisories indicating ash has reached 15 kilometers (49,000 feet) altitude.

The eruption has released a large cloud of sulfur dioxide, which will please those people advocating for its use to counter global heating.

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Winds varying at different altitudes have taken the higher ash northeast over the Red Sea, while Volcanologist Professor Erik Klemetti Gonzalez of Denison University reports ash at lower levels is moving north-northwest. There was some speculation that the lower movement might have been a pyroclastic flow, which would have considerably increased the danger for anyone in the vicinity, but that has now been rejected.

Volcanic lightning has been reported within the cloud.