The partially submerged volcano in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty is called Whakaari/White Island.
The partially submerged volcano in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty is called Whakaari/White Island. It’s a fitting name for the perpetually puffing and occasionally explosive stratovolcano offshore from North Island.
The volcano’s name is a combination of Te Puia o Whakaari (a Māori phrase for “dramatic volcano”) and White Island, which the British explorer James Cook started calling the feature in 1769 after noticing that it puffed steam almost continuously.
Conditions were on the calm side when the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 captured this image of the volcano on January 7, 2025. In an update on January 13, the local hazards monitoring group GeoNet noted that the volcano was undergoing a period of “heightened unrest” and has been emitting weak-to-moderate steam and gas plume emissions and “small amounts of ash” for the past two-to-three weeks. Due to the ash, authorities have elevated the aviation color code to orange.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
