The discovery follows a series of puzzling earthquakes that struck near a normally seismically quiet area.
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After gathering geological data, including information from a 2019 underwater survey of the region, the team realized there was a new underwater volcano about 1.5 times the height of the One World Trade Center in New York.
“The source of the magma, the reservoir, is very deep about 34 miles (55 kilometers) underground,” study lead researcher Nathalie Feuillet, a marine geoscientist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics (IPGP) told Live Science Thursday, October 21, 2021.
Seismic activity the suddenness of this is surprising, considering that only two earthquakes have been detected near Mayotte since 1972.
Recent volcanic activity in the form of layers of pumice in the lagoon near the island dates back at least 4,000 years.
In July 2018, scientists also realized that according to GPS data, Mayotte was moving eastward at about 20 centimeters per year. At the time, the island only had three or four GPS stations, so scientists installed a global navigation satellite system and seafloor seismometers around the island to learn more about the geological changes taking place there.
The findings were remarkable: combined land and seabed seismometers captured 17,000 events between February and May 2019.
In a 2019 post he wrote the team operates around the clock and is broken up into shifts. In less than 2 weeks there were nearly 800 major earthquakes (magnitudes between 3.5 and 4.9).
Their efforts paid off. “We found that these earthquakes were mostly located in an area quite close to the island about 10 km from the east coast of the island with a depth of between 20 and 50 km,” Feuillet wrote.
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