KARACHI, Pakistan – Alongside the carnage of Pakistan’s massive earthquake came a new creation: a small island of mud, stone and bubbling gas pushed forth from the seabed. Experts say the island was formed by the massive movement of the earth during the 7.7-magnitude quake that hit Pakistan’s Baluchistan province on Tuesday, killing at least 285 people. “That big shock beneath the earth causes a lot of disturbance,’’ said Zahid Rafi, director of the National Seismic Monitoring Center.
The island appeared off the coast of Gwadar, a port about 533km from Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi and 120km from Iran. Navy geologist Mohammed Danish told Pakistan’s Geo Television that a Pakistani Navy team visited the island on Wednesday. He said the mass was about 18 metres high, 30 metres wide and 76 meters long, making it a little wider than a tennis court and slightly shorter than a football field. Such islands are not entirely unusual to scientists who study the earth and its sometimes violent movements. Marco Bohnhoff, a professor of seismology at the German Center for Geosciences in Potsdam said there are two ways such islands can be created.
"There were dead fish on the surface. And on one side we could hear the hissing sound of the escaping gas," Mr Baloch said.Although they couldn't smell gas, they did put a match to the fissures from where it was oozing, and set it on fire."We put the fire out in the end, but it was quite a hassle. Not even the water could kill it, unless one poured buckets over it."
The story now doing the rounds in Gwadar is that a similar hill had jutted out of the sea 60 or 70 years ago, and that the elders had then named it the Zalzala Koh, or the quake hill.They say Tuesday's earthquake has brought it back.
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