A Ghost Island Has Emerged From the Sea Overnight
Mud volcanoes—relatively unheard of in North America, but prominent in volcanic regions around the globe—have quietly changed Earth’s landscape throughout our planet’s history.
Eagle-eyed geologist Mark Tingay recently noticed the emergence of a ‘ghost island’ in November of 2024, caused by a submarine mud volcano called Kumani Bank.
Satellites show that the island formed 15 miles off the coast of Azerbaijan in early 2023, but had diminished to only one-quarter of its maximum size by the end of 2024.
The word “volcano” encompasses a surprising panoply of geologic events. First, there are the typical volcanoes, which are further classified as red volcanoes (think Kīlauea in Hawaii) and gray volcanoes (think Mount St. Helens in Washington). Some moons in our Solar System even possess seemingly impossible cryovolcanoes, which throw up liquid water, ammonia, and various hydrocarbons. However, the most subtle of all these eruptive forces is the mud volcano—a geologic process that’s rare in North America, but all too common near tectonic plate boundaries in places like Italy, Japan, Trinidad, and Azerbaijan.
Although mud volcanoes can be highly destructive events, these bouts of volcanism—usually a mixture of mud, gasses, and other fluids—are usually more quiet affairs compared to their explosive cousins, and form as gas slowly builds up pressure inside the Earth. Once a “puncture” in the Earth forms, that presssure quickly takes the escape route.
“The idea is similar to a car tire containing compressed air. As long as the tire is intact, the air stays safely inside,” Michael Hudec, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote for The Conversation in 2019. “Once the air has a pathway out, however, it begins to escape. Sometimes the air escapes as a slow leak—in other cases there is a blowout.”
However, mud volcanoes can also be forces of creation.
Azerbaijan, a country located on the boundary of West Asia and Eastern Europe, is the world capital of mud volcanoes thanks to its position above the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The country is home to roughly 300 mud volcanoes, both on land and in the Caspian Sea, just along its eastern shore. In November of 2024, Mark Tingay, a geologist from the University of Adelaide, posted on Threads about the appearance of a “peek-a-boo” or “ghost island”—an emergent mud volcano known as Kumani Bank. Located 15 miles off the eastern coast of Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea, this island likely emerged sometime between January 30th and February 4th, 2023, according to satellite images.
“Kumani Bank is not normally visible, with its crest being just a few meters below sea level,” Tingay wrote on Threads. “However, a violent eruption can release enough material to push the crest of the mud volcano above the surface, creating a new island…these eruptions are short (minutes, sometimes hours), but incredibly violent […] and, in Azerbaijan, are often associated with pillars of flame 500-1000m high.”
Last week, NASA posted images of the ghost island compiled from its Operational Land Images (OLI), OLI-2, Landsat 8, and Landsat 9 satellites, which showed the progression of Kumani Bank. True to its name, the crest of the volcano just peeked above the water line in early 2023, stretching to a maximum size of 400 meters before receding almost completely by the end of 2024. NASA notes that Kumani Bank has had eight previously recorded eruptions, with the largest (occurring in 1950) creating an island 700 meters across and almost six meters high. So, this emergence of Kumani Bank in 2023 is only the latest chapter in this one-again, off-again island-forming drama.
“I find it amazing that an island, [approximately] 400m wide, can suddenly appear within the space of a few hours!” Tingay wrote on Threads. “You’d think that some fisherman would have gone ‘WTF? That island wasn’t there yesterday!’ and posted some photos online […]. A new [approximately] 10 hectare island just appears one day, and no one even cares. Well, I care!”
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