Scientists predict that new Pakistani island will sink back in a year.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs. 

 NASA pictures.

People use boats as they visit an island that rose from the sea following an earthquake, off Pakistan's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea September 25, 2013.

Scientists predict that new Pakistani island will sink back  in a year.

“The island is really just a big pile of mud from the seafloor that got pushed up. This area of the world seems to see so many of these features because the geology is correct for their formation. You need a shallow, buried layer of pressurized gas—methane, carbon dioxide, or something else—and fluids. When that layer becomes disturbed by seismic waves (like an earthquake), the gases and fluids become buoyant and rush to the surface, bringing the rock and mud with them,” Bill Barnhart, a geologist at the US Geological Survey told NASA’s Earth Observatory. 

The Earth Observatory says this is not the first island to have surfaced along the 700-kilometer-long coast over the past century.  Scientists predict that the new island will remain above surface for up to a year before sinking back into the Arabian sea.

The island rose out of the water during a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Balochistan, just 69 km north-northeast of Awaran -  the nearest Pakistani city - on 24 September 2013. Over 300,000 people were affected by the quake, which caused over 500 deaths, and some 21,000 houses were destroyed.