The Hayli Gubbi volcano in the Afar region of Ethiopia has erupted after being dormant for an estimated 12,000 years, sending a vast plume of smoke and ash across the Red Sea towards Yemen and Oman.
The Sunday morning eruption left the nearby village of Afdera covered in ash, according to Al Jazeera.
A resident of the Afar region, Ahmed Abdela, is quoted as saying that it “felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown”.
The volcano rises about 500 metres from the bed of the Rift Valley, a zone of intense geological activity where two tectonic plates meet.
Al Jazeera reports that, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, Hayli Gubbi has had no known eruptions during the current geological epoch, which experts know as the Holocene.
The Holocene began approximately 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.
[Image: By Ondřej Hanousek – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103282270]