The island is 100 feet (30 meters) wide, 20-40 feet (6-12 meters) high

Sep 25, 2013 08:04 GMT  ·  By

This past September 24, a M7.7 earthquake hit Pakistan. What's interesting is that, according to local reports, an island emerged off the country's coast shortly after the shake had struck.

The island is said to be about 100 feet (30 meters) wide and 20-40 feet (6-12 meters) high. It sits at a distance of 1,970 feet (600 meters) from the coastline, in the Arabian Sea.

The news of this island's formation took the scientific community by storm. Thus, geologists and other specialists are now trying to figure out how and why it came into being.

Evidence at hand suggests that, rather than being the result of a landslide, the island is a mud volcano.

Thus, Michael Manga, a geoscientist with the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out the fact that, “The description of the island, and its distance from the quake’s epicentre, is consistent with a mud volcano,” Nature reports.

Besides, several other mud volcanoes have been documented to form in this area over the years. In fact, it was back in 2001 when one other earthquake of the same magnitude that hit Pakistan caused a mud eruption to occur some 300 miles (482 kilometers) away from its epicenter.

Therefore, it is likely that the same thing happened in the aftermath of the M7.7 shake on September 24, the same source tells us.

Live Science explains that earthquakes are likely to cause mud volcanoes to form in certain areas due to the fact that, because of all the shaking, mud and water that would otherwise remain trapped beneath the sea floor find a way to reach the surface.

“A clay or shale layer can be impermeable, but if fractured during an earthquake, could release mud and water that was under pressure below the layer.”

“Or a water-rich clay layer could undergo liquefaction that would be released along fractures in the sediments,” explains researcher James Hein with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, California.