White plume over Late Is. [1]
Friday, November 13, 2015 - 15:18. Updated on Friday, November 13, 2015 - 22:33.
Photos by Nadya Zvyagina
SEE LATEST UPDATE: Fire on Late Island, causes concern [2]
A white plume coming from the peak of Late Island this morning may be a rare sighting of volcanic activity - but the volcanic activity has yet to be confirmed by Tongan authorities. The last known eruption of the island was in 1854, and last steam venting was seen in the 1970s.
A plume over the island was seen this morning by Nadya Zvyagina, a biologist, visiting unihabited Fangasito Island in southern Vava'u. Using a solar-powered cell phone on the local networks, Nadya told Matangi Tonga Online that she noticed the white plume coming from the top of the peak of the volcano that she can see clearly on the horizon. At first, she was not sure if it was just a cloud playing tricks or volcanic activity. But by this afternoon she was convinced that the plume had stayed in the same place and is new volcanic activity.
“I see a plume of white -it looks like a cloud, but not a cloud, but coming from two spots. It's not particuarly high, about two or three times the height of volcano. Not black, and I still might be wrong because an island can produce cloud that can look like eruption. But I have seen a lot of volcanoes in my life and it does look like an eruption,” Nadya said this morning.
“My distance is about 40k. The top I can see very well but don’t see whole island,”
After watching the cloud for about three hours she was more convinced. "It still looks exactly the same, it just goes a little bit more or it goes less and sometimes it has a plume that goes up and sometimes the plume disappears,” she said this afternoon.
In Nuku'alofa, a government geologist, and spokespersons for Civil Aviation, Tonga Airports and Tonga Met, said this morning that they were not aware of any volcanic activity. There had been no sightings reported by pilots today from scheduled flights over the Vava'u Group
1854 eruption
Late Island is a 6 km wide volcano located 55 km WSW of the main island of Vava'u. The volcano contains a 400m wide 150m deep summit crater. Lava flows occurred during two known eruptions from 1854 and 1790. In the 1970's weak activity was seen in the crater and steam found in a fracture on the eastern side of the island.
The volcano rises 1500m from the sea floor with its conical summit reaching 540m above sea level.
Environmentalist
Nadya, who is originally from Russia, is based in New Zealand where she works. She has visited the small islands of Tonga many times and has worked to clean up the beaches from plastics deposited around the high tide line and works to eradicate rats that kill off Tonga's rare bird species.
“Whenever I go on holiday I do something for environment,” she said. "Last year I was clearing about 16 bags of rubbish per island - there is a lot of plastic on unihabited islands. This year it is about five bags per island, and so far I have cleaned five islands - it is quite a lot of work!"
The rubbish is burned or returned to Neiafu for disposal. "It is very difficult to get the rubbish from the islands to the mainland because I had to pay for transport. Some people in Vava'u have been a tremendous help. I am a biologist so I have done this in many places,” she said, and thanked Hrant (Grant) Yeganyan who works in the Ministry of Infrastructure and Tourism, Media/IT Office.
Nadya said she had observed rare bird species of Tonga on islands where there are no rats. "I have seen a Friendly Ground Dove (Gallicolumba stairi) that has almost disappeared now in Tonga. So it’s exciting to have it on such small islands. It’s fantastic to have remants of the fauna, which we have had in the past on the mainland,” she said.