Island created by methane gas in Gwadar ‘will not last’: scientists

A small island created in the Arabian Sea near Gwadar Port by the huge earthquake that hit south-west Pakistan has fascinated locals, but scientists say it is unlikely to last long.
Off the coastline near the port, some 400 kilometres from the epicentre, people were astonished to see a new piece of land surface from the waves.
“It is not a small thing, but a huge thing which has emerged from under the water,” Muhammad Rustam, a Gwadar resident, said.
“It looked very, very strange to me and also a bit scary because suddenly a huge thing has emerged from the water.”
Muhammad Danish, a marine biologist from Pakistan 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.
The island is about 18 to 21 metres high, up to 100 metre wide and up to 40 metre long, he said.
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 happened before in that area but it’s certainly an unusual event, very rare,” Gibson said, 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.
A similar event happened in the same area in 1945 when an 8.1 magnitude earthquake at Makran triggered the formation of mud volcanoes off Gwadar.
Professor Shamim Ahmed Shaikh, chairman of the department of geology at Karachi University, said the island, which has not been named, would disperse within a couple of months.
He said it happens along the Makran coast because of the complex relationship between tectonic plates in the area. Pakistan sits close to the junction of three plates the Indian, Arabian and Eurasian.
“About a year back an island of almost similar size had surfaced at the similar distance from the coast in the Makran region. This would disperse in a week to a couple of months,” Shaikh said.
Gibson said the temporary island was very different from the permanent uplift seen during major “subduction zone” earthquakes, where plate collisions force the Earth’s crust suddenly and sometimes dramatically upwards.