This Volcano Is Waking Up After 700,000 Years of Silence

When most of us picture a volcano waking up, we imagine a dramatic plume of ash, fire lighting up the sky, and rivers of lava spilling down the flanks. That kind of spectacle might happen someday at Taftan — but what’s actually happening right now looks nothing like a movie. For more than seven hundred thousand years, this massive mountain in southeastern Iran sat in silence. People didn’t witness eruptions. The textbooks nearly wrote it off as extinct. It was quiet in every way you’d notice. And then, starting around mid-2023, something changed.

At first, scientists didn’t hear rumbling. They didn’t see ash. What they did notice was subtle — less than a foot of upward motion at the summit over ten months. Some satellites orbiting Earth measured the ground near Taftan’s peak rising by about 9 centimetres (3½ inches) between July 2023 and May 2024. That rise hasn’t gone back down, and that matters. Ground motion like this is a clear sign that something beneath the surface is pressurising the rocks.

This is a volcano that no one alive has ever seen erupt. Taftan’s last confirmed magmatic eruptions trace back to hundreds of thousands of years ago — roughly 710,000 to 400,000 years ago according to radiometric dating — and scientists have debated whether anything truly erupted in the Holocene. Still, it never completely lost its heat. The summit has long been pocked with vigorous fumaroles — vents that spew sulfur-rich gases visible from a distance — and hot springs dot the broader landscape. That tells you there’s still warmth and chemistry moving below.

So, what’s causing this quiet mountain to heave like it’s stretching itself after a deep sleep? The answer isn’t thrilling magma bursting up tomorrow. It’s more like a pressure cooker slowly warming again after the flame was turned back on. Using an advanced radar technique called InSAR — which can map ground displacement from space with incredible precision — researchers ruled out ordinary causes like heavy rainfall or earthquakes nearby. What they saw fits with internal processes: gas accumulating in cracks and pores just hundreds of metres beneath the summit rather than a huge blob of fresh magma pushing up from deep below.

If Taftan were to erupt again, it almost certainly wouldn’t start with lava pouring down the slopes like a Hawaiian volcano. Based on its past behaviour and magma chemistry, the most likely opening act would be something far more abrupt and deceptive: a phreatic explosion, driven by superheated groundwater flashing to steam as pressure finally finds a way out. That kind of eruption can happen with little warning, blasting ash, rock fragments, and gas straight out of the summit vents without any fresh magma reaching the surface. If magma did begin to rise later, the eruption would probably stay ash-rich and explosive, producing short eruption columns, localized ashfall, and potentially lava dome growth near the summit. Those domes wouldn’t flow gracefully — they’d pile up, fracture, and collapse, sending block-and-ash flows racing downslope. In other words, Taftan’s danger wouldn’t be long lava rivers you can outrun, but sudden explosions, choking ash, and gravity-driven collapses — the kind of eruption that looks quiet right up until the moment it isn’t.

To understand that, you have to look beyond the mountain itself to the tectonic forces that built it in the first place. Taftan sits in the Makran subduction zone, where the Arabian Plate continues to slide beneath the Eurasian Plate. This slow but relentless motion — measured in centimetres per year — drags water-soaked oceanic crust down into the mantle. As that slab descends, it releases water and volatiles that lower the melting point of rocks above, generating magma deep down. Over millions of years, that process built the stratovolcano we see today.

But subduction doesn’t always generate an unclogged pipeline from deep magma reservoir to surface vent. Magma stalls. It cools. It crystallises and plugs pathways. That’s why Taftan could go hundreds of thousands of years without a full-blown eruption — it wasn’t “dead,” it was bottled up. What’s happening now doesn’t necessarily mean molten rock is already welling up toward the surface. Instead, it may be gases freed from deeper melt pockets or changes in the hydrothermal plumbing that are pressurising the shallow near-summit system, squeezing rocks outward and nudging the mountain upward a few centimetres at a time.

Locals noticed something wasn’t quite right before the satellites did. In 2023 people reported strong sulfurous smells in towns up to fifty kilometres away, presumably carried on winds from the fumaroles that have always poked at the summit. Events like this highlight the fact that the ground deformation isn’t random noise — it’s sustained, measurable, and likely the first unmistakable sign that Taftan’s internal system is shifting.

None of this means Taftan is erupting tomorrow — or even this century. The volcano’s deep magma reservoir still lies kilometres down, and the current uplift points to shallow pressure buildup rather than an imminent magma ascent. But it does mean that what geologists had long labeled “extinct” is better thought of as dormant and awakening.

Taftan isn’t waking up because something new happened — it’s waking up because the tectonic system beneath it never stopped working. After seven hundred thousand years of silence, the volcano is simply reminding us that in geology, quiet never means finished.

Here's the video we made on this on the OzGeology YouTube Channel: