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A long-dormant volcano in Ethiopia erupted for the first time in roughly 12,000 years, blanketing a neighboring village in ash and soot, authorities announced.
The Hayli Gubbi volcano, located in the Afar region near the Eritrean border, erupted for several hours Sunday morning.
The first eruption from the volcano in modern history spewed massive plumes of ash and coated the neighboring village of Afdera in dust.
Ash clouds from the freak eruption drifted across the Red Sea toward Yemen and Oman.
“It felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown with smoke and ash,” resident Ahmed Abdela said.
There were no casualties, according to Local administrator Mohammad Seid. But the volcano’s awakening could have implications for the local community of livestock herders.
“While no human lives and livestock have been lost so far, many villages have been covered in ash, and as a result, their animals have little to eat,” he said.
The village, near the Danakil desert, was still covered in ash on Monday — leaving tourists and guides stranded there, according to Abdela.
There are no records of the Hayli Gubbi erupting in the Holocene epoch, a geological time period that started roughly 11,700 years ago with the end of the last ice age, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.
The volcano, which reaches a towering 1,600 feet tall, sits within the Rift Valley, a region of intense geological activity where two tectonic plates meet.
With Post wires.
