On March 30, 2014, the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of the combined island. The merged island is now slightly more than six-tenths of a mile across. The growing islet, originally called Niijima, is now considered part of its larger neighbor, Nishinoshima.
{"Image ImageWidth": "720", "Image ImageLength": "720", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "On November 2013, a seafloor volcano in the western Pacific Ocean spewed enough material to rise above the water line. The new island, or ???niijima??? in Japanese, sprouted just 500 meters from Nishino-shima, another volcanic island that had last erupted and expanded in 1973???74. Four months later, the new and the old are now one island, and the volcanic eruption shows no sign of abating.\nOn March 30, 2014, the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of Nishino-shima, which sits about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of Tokyo in the Ogasawara (Bonin) Island chain (approximately 27??14??? North, 140??52??? East). The enlarged inset photo includes a white outline depicting the extent of the new island on December 30, 2013.\nThe niijima portion of the island is now larger than the original Nishino-shima, and the merged island is slightly more than 1,000 meters across. Two cones have formed around the main vents and stand more than 60 meters above sea level, triple the highest point of the island in December. Volcanic lava flows are reported to be most active now on the south end of the island. Volcanologist and blogger Erik Klemetti noted earlier in 2014: ???This is a great example of how volcanic islands like this in the Bonin Islands grow over hundreds to thousands of eruptions.???\nA plume of volcanic gas, steam, and ash rises from the island. Tiny particles in the plume are seeding the formation of fluffy cumulus clouds. The intermittent, pulsing shape of the cloud stream might be a reflection of the volcanic eruption itself. Strombolian explosions are essentially bubbles of lava and gas rising from Earth???s interior in pulses. Underwater, sediment appears to be stirred up in a green plume that stretches eastward from the island.\nTo view aerial photographs of the growing island, visit the Japan Coast Guard page.\nReferences\nErik Klemetti, for Wired (2013, December 27) Eruptions Blog: Nishino-shima. Accessed April 3, 2014.\nGlobal Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institution (2014, January) Nishino-shima. Accessed April 3, 2014.\nNASA Earth Observatory (2013, December 18) New Island in the Ring of Fire.\nVolcano Discovery (2014, March 4) Nishino-shima volcano activity update. Accessed April 3, 2014.\nThe Watchers (2014, March 26) New images of growing Japanese island Nishino-shima. Accessed April 3, 2014.\nNASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data from the USGS Earth Explorer. Coastline derived from data ??2013 Digital Globe. Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with some interpretation from Erik Klemetti.", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2014:04:07 10:51:06", "Image ExifOffset": "2860", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3012", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "1937", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1280", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "720"}