It’s not often that a whole new chunk of land just comes jutting out of the ocean, but that’s just what happened with a new island in the South Pacific. A large undersea volcano blew its top in late 2014, shooting rock and ash skyward, and once everything calmed down an entirely new island had been formed. Now, NASA is looking at the newly formed landmass for possible hints at how the landscape of Mars behaved billions of years ago.
The new island, which is being referred to by the unofficial name Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, didn’t seem to have a bright future when it first emerged in the wake of the volcano’s fury, but researchers now believe it actually might stick around for quite a while. New data suggests it might even last as long as 30 years.
“Everything we learn about what we see on Mars is based on the experience of interpreting Earth phenomena,” Jim Garvin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explains. “We think there were eruptions on Mars at a time when there were areas of persistent surface water. We may be able to use this new Tongan island and its evolution as a way of testing whether any of those represented an oceanic environment or ephemeral lake environment.”
[contentcards url=”http://bgr.com/2017/12/12/mars-island-nasa-hunga-tonga-hunga-ha-apai/” target=”_blank”]