World Shocked As “Extinct” Volcano Reawakens: Hayli Gubbi

World Shocked As “Extinct” Volcano Reawakens

It began with a column of ash punching fourteen kilometres into the sky — a blast so sudden and violent that satellite operators described it as looking “like a bomb going off.” A volcano that no one alive had ever seen stir, a volcano absent from all historical memory, had roared awake in the Ethiopian desert. Hayli Gubbi, silent for roughly twelve thousand years, tore open the floor of the Afar with an eruption powerful enough to darken nearby villages and send ash drifting over the Red Sea toward Yemen and Oman. Locals watched daylight turn grey as the ground trembled beneath them, a shock for a region accustomed to heat and dust but not an eruption of this scale. And yet the most astonishing part wasn’t the size of the plume or the quiet panic that followed — it was the simple fact that this volcano wasn’t supposed to erupt at all. It wasn’t even listed as active. It belonged to a geological past most thought was finished.

*Image depicts the Hayli Gubbi caldera

But while the eruption stunned the world, the truth is that the Afar Depression has a habit of hiding its violence beneath a mask of stillness. It is a landscape that stretches wide and flat, glazed with salt flats and ancient lava flows, a place where heat haze trembles above the ground like a mirage. To an untrained eye, it looks dead. Even to a trained eye, it can feel static — a barren, silent desert. But just beneath this thin crust lies a restless engine, a tectonic tension so immense that entire continents are bending to its will. Hayli Gubbi did not erupt out of nowhere, even if it appeared that way. It erupted because the ground beneath it is stretching like slowly torn fabric, because magma is rising through pathways opened by the rift, because the Afar is one of the very few places on Earth where a new ocean is literally beginning to form. The eruption was dramatic, sudden, and unexpected — but it was also inevitable, the surface expression of a process that has been building for millions of years.

For the people living near Lake Afdera, the first warning came not from scientists or sensors but from the land itself. A low rumble, a shudder in the ground, the sudden metallic taste of ash settling on the tongue. In remote corners of Ethiopia, where technology rarely intrudes and monitoring stations are few, eruptions are often felt before they are measured. And so it was here: shepherds and salt workers looked up to see the sky darkening in the middle of the afternoon. A towering column of grey ash rose vertically before bending, carried by upper-level winds toward the Red Sea. Fine particles fell onto homes and livestock pens, coating the landscape in a thin, ghostly layer. Parents pulled children indoors. The air grew thick and abrasive. All of it happened within hours, a violent awakening in a place so geologically alive and yet so rarely observed that no early-warning systems were in place to anticipate what Hayli Gubbi was about to do.

News travelled slowly at first. The Afar Desert is one of the hottest and most isolated regions on Earth, where temperatures frequently exceed 45°C and human settlement is sparse. But satellites saw everything. Within minutes of the eruption, meteorologists and volcanologists around the world were staring at the same image: a perfect grey plume erupting from a location they knew better for lava lakes like Erta Ale than for explosive ash columns. The shape of the plume — smooth, symmetrical, almost mushroom-like — hinted at a sudden release of deep, pressurised gases. This wasn’t the gentle, effusive basaltic lava flow the Afar is famous for. This was an event with real force behind it, the kind of eruption that demands the world’s attention not because of its scale but because of what it reveals about the planet’s interior.

The eruption persisted into the night, an intermittent series of pulses rather than a continuous fountain. Seismic stations hundreds of kilometres away recorded small but distinct tremors — nothing destructive, just the sharp signatures of magma adjusting itself underground. Villages reported the faint smell of sulphur drifting across the desert. Pilots received warnings to avoid flight paths over the Red Sea. In Yemen, residents noticed a light dusting of grey on vehicles and rooftops. Within a day, ash was detected over parts of Oman. The idea that a long-dead Ethiopian volcano could shake awake so powerfully that its ash crossed oceans captured global headlines. And for good reason: eruptions from geologically dormant volcanoes are rare, but eruptions from volcanoes that haven’t erupted in twelve thousand years are almost unheard of.

To volcanologists, that dormancy isn’t a mere footnote — it’s a revelation. A volcano that has slept that long often has cold, crystallising magma inside, the kind that produces sluggish, sticky eruptions or none at all. But Hayli Gubbi erupted with force, meaning the magma feeding it was not merely old material reactivated by heat. It had to be replenished by something deeper. Something hotter. Something rising from the mantle itself. And that is where the story of the eruption transitions into something far larger than one volcano. Because Hayli Gubbi is not an isolated peak. It is a vent on a crack in the planet — a crack that grows wider every year.

The Afar Depression is one of Earth’s most extraordinary tectonic environments, a place where the continent is splitting apart along the East African Rift System. But unlike other rifts around the world, the Afar Rift is part of a triple junction — a truly rare geological configuration where three tectonic plates diverge at once. To the north lies the Arabian Plate, drifting steadily away across the Red Sea. To the east lies the Somali Plate, which is peeling away from the African mainland. And to the west lies the Nubian Plate, sliding in yet another direction. All three are moving apart, creating a region of intense stretching where the crust thins like taffy pulled too far.

*Image depicts the Tectonic Map of the Afar Depression

When the crust thins, the pressure on the underlying mantle drops. And when pressure drops, solid mantle rock melts. This is decompression melting, the quiet but relentless engine of rift volcanism. Every millimetre of stretching allows more melt to form, more magma to rise, more volcanoes to awaken. This process has already opened cracks deep enough that seawater can one day pour through them. Geologists estimate that in a few million years, the Afar will be flooded by the ocean, splitting Ethiopia from Somalia and creating a new sea. The eruption of Hayli Gubbi is not just a volcanic event — it is another step in the slow, unstoppable birth of an ocean basin.

That truth hides behind the violence of the eruption, but it is the reason the eruption happened at all. For decades, the Afar has been undergoing periods of rapid tectonic change. In 2005, a 60-kilometre-long rift tore open in just a matter of days during the Dabbahu event, an extraordinary reminder that continents do not always move quietly. Since then, the region has experienced repeated magma intrusions, subtle uplift, and fault ruptures that geologists track with growing fascination. Erta Ale’s lava lake has risen and fallen dramatically. New fissures have opened in fields of basalt. The ground has shifted in measurable increments. Each change hints at something deeper reorganising the plumbing of the region.

Hayli Gubbi, until now forgotten, has clearly been listening.

Somewhere beneath the volcano, fresh magma began rising through the old, crystallised leftovers of past eruptions. It pressed into cracks, widening them. It filled weaknesses in the bedrock created by the stretching of the rift. It pooled in a chamber that had not been replenished in thousands of years. When enough pressure built, when the gases dissolved in the magma reached a critical point, the chamber cracked, the magma surged upward, and the volcano that everyone thought was extinct proved it had only been resting. The eruption wasn’t a fluke. It was a signal — a sharp reminder that even the quietest volcanoes in the Afar exist because nothing here is ever truly stable.

The Afar Depression may appear desolate, empty, and forgotten by time, but beneath its stillness lies a tectonic battle that is reshaping the continent. Hayli Gubbi’s awakening is a glimpse into the deeper forces shaping Africa’s future. The eruption did not merely send ash toward Yemen or surprise the scientific community; it revealed that the rift beneath Ethiopia is alive, volatile, and continuing to evolve. The desert may seem silent, but the Earth here is screaming in slow motion, pulling itself apart grain by grain, eruption by eruption.

The story of Hayli Gubbi is not a story of destruction. It is a story of creation. A pulse in the long rhythm of continental breakup. A reminder that every peaceful landscape, every quiet desert floor, hides a truth far older and far more dramatic than anyone expects. Few people knew this volcano existed. Even fewer knew it could erupt. But now the world has seen it — a forgotten vent on a continent being torn open. And as the ash settles and the desert returns to its deceptive calm, the deeper process continues, patient and unstoppable. Africa is splitting. A new ocean is forming. And Hayli Gubbi is one of the voices in that tectonic chorus, speaking for the first time in twelve thousand years.

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