JUST IN: In the scorching expanse of Ethiopia’s Afar region, where the Earth’s crust fractures like brittle glass, the Hayli Gubbi volcano shattered millennia of silence on November 23, 2025.
Perched about 500 kilometers northeast of Addis Ababa, near the Eritrean border, this modest 500-meter shield volcano—long presumed dormant—unleashed an explosive fury unseen in the Holocene epoch, which dawned roughly 12,000 years ago at the close of the last Ice Age.
Satellite imagery from NASA’s MODIS and advisories from the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre captured the spectacle: a colossal plume of ash and sulfur dioxide rocketing skyward to 14 kilometers, dwarfing the horizon and drifting eastward across the Red Sea toward Yemen, Oman, and as far as India and northern Pakistan.
Hayli Gubbi slumbers in the Afar Rift, a tectonic crucible where the African and Arabian plates wrench apart, birthing new seafloor in one of Earth’s most volatile zones.
Neighbors like the perpetually simmering Erta Ale, with its eternal lava lake, underscore the area’s restless geology, yet this eruption marks a rare awakening for Hayli Gubbi, with no prior Holocene activity etched in geological records, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.
