Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 12, 2026
A new island rises from the Pacific
Satellites are tracking a volcanic eruption building near Papua New Guinea's Bismarck Sea, the first time this kind of undersea eruption has been documented from the initial earthquake swarm through ash plumes and a mapped thermal hotspot. The arc will run as the vent either breaches the ocean surface into new land or subsides, in one of the least-mapped patches of ocean on the planet.
The story so far
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Jul 12, 2026 Latest
On May 8, an earthquake swarm along Titan Ridge in the Bismarck Sea north of Papua New Guinea signaled a new eruption, and within days NASA's Aqua, Terra and PACE satellites and Europe's Sentinel-2 and Landsat 9 caught steam plumes, discolored water and ash reaching kilometers into the sky. By May 12, the VIIRS instrument had mapped an underwater thermal hotspot covering about seven square kilometers, though scientists still do not know how deep the vent sits or whether it will break the surface.
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