When Islands Pop Out Of The Sea
When a mud volcano erupted last week and created a muddy mound of an island just off the southern coast of Pakistan, it seemed to us like a rather rare development.
But it turns out islands crop up fairly often. Charles Darwin commented on one. And it's been happening in shallow marshy patches off the coasts of Sweden and Finland for millennia.
Darwin's Find
Back in 1835, Darwin found a bit of seafloor that had been wrenched up to the surface in Chile. He recounts the story in A Naturalist's Voyage, published in 1889.
Arriving on the island of Quiriquina after an earthquake, he wrote that some areas looked "as if they had been blasted by gunpowder" and even that "some cows which were standing on the steep side of the island were rolled into the sea."
Darwin also describes fresh chunks of island, hugging what had formerly been the shore. In a journal entry from March 4, he wrote: "During my walk around the island, I observed that numerous fragments of rock, which, from the marine productions adhering to them, must recently have been lying in deep water, had been cast up high on the beach."
The scene prompted a moment of realization.
"A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations," he wrote. "The earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced."
New Nordic Islands
In Finland and Sweden, islands have been slowly but steadily popping out of the sea for thousands of years.
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