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.
“Currently, this activity is not affecting air traffic as the dominant wind is blowing the ash away from the mainland and the plume is very low elevation—a few thousand feet,” said Craig Miller, a geophysicist at GNS Science. He added that while this type of passive ash emission is technically an eruption, events need to be more explosive to be classified as a minor eruption (level 3 on the regional system for Volcanic Alert Levels).
GeoNet geologists think magma is quite close to the surface based on high vent temperatures. When magma is near the surface, it becomes easier for rising gases to pull small bits of cooled magma into the plume as ash fragments, he said. Sometimes hot gases rising through the vent also cause bits of the crater wall to flake off into the plume and become an additional source of ash, he added.
References & Resources
- Bay of Plenty Times (2025, January 13) Whakaari/White Island emitting minor volcanic ash—aviation code raised to orange. Accessed January 14, 2025.
- GeoNet (2025, January 13) GNS Whakaari/White Island. Accessed January 14, 2025.
- Global Volcanism Program (2024) Whakaari/White Island. Accessed January 14, 2025.
- Kilgour, G., et al. (2021) Whakaari/White Island: a review of New Zealand’s most active volcano. New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 64, 2021.
- Volcano Discovery (2025) White Island Volcano. Accessed January 14, 2025.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey . Story by Adam Voiland .
