Magnitude 7.7 earthquake kills hundreds in Pakistan
Posted Sep 25, 2013QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Hungry survivors dug through rubble to find food and thousands slept under the open sky or in makeshift shelters for a second night as the death toll from Pakistan’s massive earthquake rose to 348 on Thursday. Rescuers battled to reach remote areas of the impoverished region in the wake of Tuesday’s magnitude 7.7 quake in southwestern Baluchistan province.
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How Did the Pakistan Earthquake Create a Mud Island?
A mud volcano is thought to be behind new landmass.
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck a remote part of Pakistan with enough force to create a small island.
Photograph from Gwadar Government/AP
Published September 25, 2013
On
Tuesday, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck a remote part of western
Pakistan, killing more than 260 people and displacing hundreds of
thousands. It also triggered formation of a new island off the coast,
which has quickly become a global curiosity.
But scientists say the island won't last long.
"It's
a transient feature," said Bill Barnhart, a research geophysicist with
the U.S. Geological Survey. "It will probably be gone within a couple of
months. It's just a big pile of mud that was on the seafloor that got
pushed up."
Indeed, such islands are formed by so-called
mud volcanoes, which occur around the world, and Barnhart and other
scientists suspect that's what we're seeing off the Pakistani coast.
News organizations have reported
that the Pakistani island suddenly appeared near the port of Gwadar
after the quake. The island is about 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 meters)
high, up to 300 feet (91 meters) wide, and up to 120 feet (37 meters)
long, reports the AFP.
Media reports have located the
new island at just a few paces to up to two kilometers off the coast of
Pakistan. It is about 250 miles (400 kilometers) from the epicenter of
the earthquake.
Map by National Geographic maps.
The
island appears to be primarily made out of mud from the seafloor,
although photos show rocks as well, Barnhart told National Geographic.
He has has been studying images and media accounts of the new island
from his lab in Golden, Colorado.
"It brought up a dead octopus, and people have been picking up fish on [the island]," he said.
A
similar mud island appeared off Pakistan after a 2011 earthquake there,
Barnhart said: "It lasted a month or two and then washed away."
How Mud Volcanoes Work
Though mud volcanoes have been seen elsewhere, they don't always produce islands.
Such
volcanoes were seen in California after a 2010 earthquake, Barnhart
noted, when the tremors caused carbon dioxide to bubble up through the
ground, but the result was "vigorous boiling," not new islands.
Barnhart said Pakistani scientists will soon be measuring the new landmass to better understand how it formed.
People walk along the island that emerged after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck a remote part of Pakistan.
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TIME World
A Bird’s Eye View of Earth’s Newest Island
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Pakistan quake island unlikely to last: experts
by Staff Writers
Gwadar, Pakistan (AFP) Sept 25, 2013
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The 7.7-magnitude quake struck on Tuesday in Baluchistan's remote Awaran district, killing at least 271 people and affecting hundreds of thousands.
Off the coastline near the port of Gwadar, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the epicentre, locals were astonished to see the dark grey mass of rock and mud that had emerged from the waves in the Arabian Sea.
"It is not a small thing, but a huge thing which has emerged from under the water," Gwadar resident Muhammad Rustam told AFP.
"It looked very, very strange to me and also a bit scary because suddenly a huge thing has emerged from the water."
Enterprising boat owners were doing a brisk trade ferrying curious sightseers to the island -- dubbed "Earthquake Mountain" by locals.
Mohammad Danish, a marine biologist from Pakistan's National Institute of Oceanography, said a team of experts had visited the island and found methane gas rising.
"Our team found bubbles rising from the surface of the island which caught fire when a match was lit and we forbade our team to start any flame. It is methane gas," Danish said on GEO television news.
The island is about 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 metres) high, up to 300 feet wide and up to 120 feet long, he said. It sits about 650 feet from the coast.
The surface was a solid but muddy mix of stones, sand and water with visible cracks, said an AFP cameraman who visited the island. Dead fish and sea plants lay on the surface.
Gary Gibson, a seismologist with Australia's University of Melbourne, said the new island was likely to be a "mud volcano", created by methane gas forcing material upwards during the violent shaking of the earthquake.
"It's happened before in that area but it's certainly an unusual event, very rare," Gibson told AFP, adding that it was "very curious" to see such activity some 400 kilometres from the quake's epicentre.
The so-called island is not a fixed structure but a body of mud that will be broken down by wave activity and dispersed over time, the scientist said.
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