A New Volcanic Island Swallows Its Older Sister

Tens of thousands of years ago, an undersea volcano a thousand kilometers south of Tokyo, Japan, reached a milestone: Its peak reached the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It became an actual island. For millennia it slept, but in the 1970s a series of eruptions grew the island, which was named Nishinoshima. It was tiny, just a couple of hundred meters across. But then there were a series of eruptions just south of the island in November of 2013, in a still-submerged part of the volcano. This creat...