Deadly Pakistan earthquake creates a mysterious new island

A massive, 7.7 magnitude quake struck south-central Pakistan on Tuesday afternoon local time. 

The USGS warns that there will high casualties and economic losses, requiring international response. Seismologists have also confirmed that the quake raised a new island, about 30-40 feet high, off the coast.

The island is about half a mile off the coast of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea. Already, reports the International Herald Tribune, crowds have gathered to see the mountainous, rocky island. Some are claiming it is 100 feet long.

On the Gwadar coastline, the quake created a small island about half a mile into the sea near an area called ‘Jhanda’, according to Express News.

The newly appearing island is said to have a mountainous terrain rising up to a hundred feet. A large crowd was seen gathering at the site to see the new island.

It's not unusual for earthquakes of this magnitude to change the coastline, or even deform the shape of the planet. In 2010, an 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile created new coastlines in that country and changed the shape of the Earth enough to shorten our days by a fraction of a second. 

Today in Pakistan, estimates of damages are still coming in, and it may be days before we know the full extent of the losses because the quake struck in many regions that are remote.

Meet the Bloop

By Alasdair Wilkins

In the summer of 1997, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up a sound from deep beneath the Pacific. The sound seemed to come from an animal far larger than any we've ever seen. This was the Bloop.

The Bloop is one of about a half-dozen unexplained sounds that the NOAA's Acoustic Monitoring Project has picked up in its more than twenty years listening to the noises of the Pacific. While some of these sounds seem to have relatively obvious explanations, a few really are baffling, and they represent one of science's great unanswered mysteries. Let's now take a closer listen to the Bloop and five other strange underwater sounds.

Back in the Cold War, the US Navy set up a series of massive arrays of microphones throughout the world's oceans. these, unsurprisingly enough, meant as a way to listen in on Soviet submarines, and they took advantage of a phenomenon known as the deep sound channel, an ocean layer where the speed of sound becomes virtually nothing and low-frequency soundwaves that enter the channel can become trapped, bouncing around in this layer for thousands of miles.

This phenomenon allowed the arrays of the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, to be able to detect even relatively weak sounds from hundreds of miles away. With the end of the Cold War around 1990, the arrays' original 30-year mission came to an end and was replaced with a new civilian function of just generally monitoring the sounds the ocean. For the last twenty years, the NOAA and its Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array have been doing just that.