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In early 2015, Earth saw the birth of a new island

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...the first of its explosive type in 53 years.

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The blast was so large that nearby tourists caught the explosion on camera.

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The new island, unofficially known as Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai,

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is located in the remote South Pacific,

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nestled between two other islands in the Kingdom of Tonga.

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It's the first island of its kind to erupt and persist in the modern satellite era,

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giving scientists an unprecedented view from space of its erosional evolution.

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The event immediately caught the attention of Dr. Jim Garvin,

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Chief Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, geomorphologist, and Mars expert.

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[Garvin] It should be a pile of basaltic anticidic rocks.

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That’s what you expect in this kind of setting...but there’s more.

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[narrator] What does a Mars expert see in the island that the rest of us don't?

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[Garvin] I think these small islands, small volcanic islands, freshly made, evolving rapidly

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are windows into the role of surface waters on Mars as they have effected

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small land forms like volcanoes. And we see fields of them on Mars!

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[narrator] The island dramatically changed shape and size every day for the first few months

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About six months in, it finally stabilized.

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[Garvin] We watched this island change. And it got more and more exciting.

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It didn’t wash away. While there was massive erosion, there was redeposition, protecting the island.

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Similar processes seen on Earth may have been at work two or three billion years ago

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on Mars - persistent surface waters that may have fashioned

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the Martian terrain that is evident there today.

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[narrator] The truth is the two systems are actually cosmically related

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Our understanding of landforms on distant planets

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is directly informed by studying the evolution of similar features on Earth.

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[Garvin] Earth is a magical place because, really, it’s our point of departure for everything

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And we come to realize in the last hundred years or so

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that it’s a far more dynamic world than we ever thought.

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