A volcanic eruption has created a new island near Tonga

(Image credit: Twitter.com/SkyNews)

There's a new island off the shore of Tonga, but it could vanish just as soon as it appeared.

For about a month, a volcano in the ocean 40 miles northwest of Nuku'alofa has been erupting. A volcanologist from New Zealand named Nico Fournier decided to take a closer look, and took a boat to within a mile of the new island. There, he discovered that the island was mostly made of loose scoria and about 1.1 miles by .9 miles, rising roughly 100 meters above the sea.

"It's quite an exciting site, you get to see the birth of an island," he told The Associated Press. "Visually it was quite spectacular, but there was no big sound coming with it, no boom. It was a bit eerie." Experts say that once the volcano stops erupting, it will take just a few months for the ocean to erode it away.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.