On 23 November 2025, a spectacular and sudden volcanic eruption shook one of the most geologically restless corners of the planet: the Danakil Depression in northeastern Ethiopia. The volcano responsible, known as Hayli Gub (sometimes transliterated as Haili Gub or Hayli Gube), had remained dormant throughout the entirety of recorded human history – approximately 12,000 years. Its explosive awakening was so abrupt and powerful that people standing several kilometres away initially mistook the sound for a bomb blast.
The eruption column of ash and gas soared to around 500 feet (150 metres) almost instantly and continued growing, eventually becoming visible from space. Satellite imagery tracked the plume as it drifted eastward on upper-level winds, crossing the Red Sea, passing over Oman and Yemen, and later reaching Pakistan, India, and beyond. The ash cloud disrupted air travel across parts of South Asia and the Middle East, leading to numerous flight cancellations, particularly in Delhi, where visibility and engine safety concerns forced authorities to ground aircraft temporarily.
Volcanic ash poses a unique hazard to aviation. It consists of tiny fragments of rock, volcanic glass, and mineral crystals that can sandblast cockpit windows, reducing visibility to near zero, while the abrasive particles can clog and overheat jet engines, sometimes causing complete engine failure. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland famously demonstrated this risk on a continental scale, and the 2025 Hayli Gub event served as a smaller but stark reminder.
Remarkably, despite the eruption’s intensity – with shockwaves audible up to 190 km away and seismic tremors felt in neighbouring Djibouti – no human lives were lost. The volcano lies in one of the most inhospitable and sparsely populated places on Earth: the Danakil Depression, part of the broader Afar Triangle. Average temperatures regularly exceed 50 °C, annual rainfall is almost non-existent, and the landscape sits well below sea level in places. Few communities live close enough to be directly affected, which proved fortunate on this occasion.
Yet the eruption was far more than a dramatic natural spectacle. It offered a vivid illustration of a much larger, slower, and truly monumental process that has been unfolding for millions of years: the ongoing breakup of the African continent.
To understand what happened at Hayli Gub, we must zoom out – both in space and in time.
Earth’s outer shell is not a single unbroken sphere but a jigsaw puzzle of rigid plates floating atop a viscous mantle. These tectonic plates are in constant, if imperceptibly slow, motion. Where plates pull apart, new crust is created; where they collide, mountains rise or oceans close. The Afar region sits at an extraordinarily rare tectonic junction known as a triple junction, where three plates meet: the Nubian Plate (forming most of Africa), the Somalian Plate (to the east), and the Arabian Plate (to the north).
At this triple junction, all three plates are diverging. The Arabian Plate has already separated from Africa over the past 30 million years, opening the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Now, the same process is beginning within the African plate itself. The Nubian and Somalian plates are being stretched and torn apart along a feature called the East African Rift System – one of the most spectacular geological phenomena on the planet.
The East African Rift stretches more than 6,000 km from the Red Sea in the north, through Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, all the way to the coast of the Indian Ocean. In Afar, the rifting is already well advanced; the crust has thinned dramatically, allowing magma to rise easily toward the surface. This explains the profusion of active volcanoes, lava lakes (such as Erta Ale), colourful hydrothermal fields, and salt flats that make the Danakil Depression look almost alien.
The 2025 Hayli Gub eruption was triggered by magma intruding into fractures created as the Somalian Plate continues to pull away from the Nubian Plate at a rate of roughly 2–5 centimetres per year – approximately the same speed at which human fingernails grow. While that may sound negligible, over geological time it adds up to thousands of kilometres.
Scientists estimate that, if the rifting continues at its present rate, a new ocean basin will begin to flood the Afar Depression and the rift valley further south within the next 5 to 10 million years. Eastern Africa – including Somalia, parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania – will eventually become a separate continent, an island similar in scale to Madagascar or New Zealand. The Indian Ocean will pour in, creating a new sea that will separate the “Horn of Africa continent” (sometimes informally called “Somaliand” in geological literature) from the rest of Africa.
Evidence of this inexorable tearing is already visible on the ground. In 2005, a 60-kilometre-long fissure opened in the Afar region in a matter of days, reaching widths of up to eight metres – a dramatic episode captured by satellite and studied intensively ever since. Similar, smaller cracks appear periodically, often accompanied by earthquake swarms and volcanic activity.
The East African Rift is not a single continuous gash but consists of two main branches: the Eastern Rift (running through Kenya and Tanzania, home to landmarks such as Mount Kilimanjaro, the Ngorongoro Crater, and the Great Rift Valley lakes) and the Western Rift (marked by deep lakes such as Tanganyika and Albert). The Afar Triangle represents the northernmost tip, where continental rifting is transitioning into seafloor spreading – the same process that created the Atlantic Ocean over the past 200 million years.
Volcanism is an integral part of the story. Magma generated by decompression melting beneath the thinning crust feeds hundreds of volcanoes along the rift. Some, like Erta Ale, maintain persistent lava lakes – one of only a handful worldwide. Others, such as Hayli Gub, lie dormant for millennia before suddenly reactivating when new fractures tap their magma chambers.
The 2025 eruption was not entirely unexpected. Seismologists had noted increased activity in the area for months, including ground deformation detected by satellite radar and minor steam emissions from nearby vents. A separate eruption occurred at Erta Ale in July 2025, and white plumes had been observed rising from Hayli Gub itself. These were clear warning signs that the rift was once again stretching and injecting fresh magma into the crust.
For local communities, the long-term implications are profound. Although the Danakil Depression itself is almost uninhabited, the broader rift zone is home to millions of people. Future earthquakes, fissure openings, and volcanic eruptions pose ongoing hazards. At the same time, the geothermal energy potential is enormous, and countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya are already tapping rift-related steam fields for electricity generation.
From a global perspective, the rifting of Africa provides geologists with a rare natural laboratory. Most continental breakups occurred tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving only their final products – passive continental margins and wide ocean basins – to study. In East Africa, researchers can observe the entire sequence in real time: crustal thinning, faulting, volcanism, subsidence, and eventually marine incursion.
Advanced monitoring tools – satellite interferometry (InSAR), GPS networks, seismic arrays, and drone surveys – now allow scientists to track millimetre-scale ground movements and forecast episodes of unrest with increasing accuracy. International collaborations, including the Natural Environment Research Council (UK), CNRS (France), and various American and Ethiopian institutions, maintain permanent observatories in the region.
As 2025 draws to a close, the Hayli Gub eruption serves as both a warning and a reminder of nature’s immense power and patience. On a human timescale, continents appear eternal and immovable. Yet on the geological timescale that governs Earth’s history, they are transient features, continually created, destroyed, and reshaped.
Ten million years from now – a mere blink in our planet’s 4.56-billion-year story – the map of eastern Africa will look radically different. Where camels and Afar nomads today cross salt flats beneath a merciless sun, ships may one day sail above a young and expanding ocean.
The dramatic events of November 2025 were not an anomaly but a brief, fiery glimpse of a transformation that began long before humans walked the Earth and will continue long after our civilizations have faded. They remind us that the ground beneath our feet is alive, and that even the mightiest continents are, in the end, temporary.
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