In early 2015, Earth saw the birth of a new island
...the first of its explosive type in 53 years.
The blast was so large that nearby tourists caught the explosion on camera.
The new island, unofficially known as Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai,
is located in the remote South Pacific,
nestled between two other islands in the Kingdom of Tonga.
It's the first island of its kind to erupt and persist in the modern satellite era,
giving scientists an unprecedented view from space of its erosional evolution.
The event immediately caught the attention of Dr. Jim Garvin,
Chief Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, geomorphologist, and Mars expert.
[Garvin] It should be a pile of basaltic anticidic rocks.
That’s what you expect in this kind of setting...but there’s more.
[narrator] What does a Mars expert see in the island that the rest of us don't?
[Garvin] I think these small islands, small volcanic islands, freshly made, evolving rapidly
are windows into the role of surface waters on Mars as they have effected
small land forms like volcanoes. And we see fields of them on Mars!
[narrator] The island dramatically changed shape and size every day for the first few months
About six months in, it finally stabilized.
[Garvin] We watched this island change. And it got more and more exciting.
It didn’t wash away. While there was massive erosion, there was redeposition, protecting the island.
Similar processes seen on Earth may have been at work two or three billion years ago
on Mars - persistent surface waters that may have fashioned
the Martian terrain that is evident there today.
[narrator] The truth is the two systems are actually cosmically related
Our understanding of landforms on distant planets
is directly informed by studying the evolution of similar features on Earth.
[Garvin] Earth is a magical place because, really, it’s our point of departure for everything
And we come to realize in the last hundred years or so
that it’s a far more dynamic world than we ever thought.