The Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region has erupted for the first time in at least 12,000 years, blanketing nearby villages in ash and sending a massive plume thousands of kilometres across the atmosphere toward the Middle East and Asia, experts and local officials said.
The eruption began on Sunday and lasted several hours, coating the village of Afdera and surrounding communities in grey dust. Local administrator Mohammed Seid said there were no reports of deaths or livestock losses but warned that the fallout could be devastating for herders who rely on sparse grazing land.
“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,” Seid said.
Residents described a sudden, violent blast. “It felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown with smoke and ash,” said Afar resident Ahmed Abdela, who reported hearing a loud roar followed by what he called a shock wave.
The Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) said the eruption sent ash to heights of around 14km (about 45,000ft), well into cruising altitudes for long-haul aircraft. Satellite tracking shows the ash cloud moving east from the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea, and onward over Yemen and Oman, before spreading toward northern India and on toward China.
By Tuesday, aviation regulators in India and elsewhere had issued advisories, with several airlines cancelling or rerouting flights to avoid the ash, which can stall jet engines and sandblast aircraft surfaces. Air India and Akasa Air cancelled or diverted multiple international services, while other carriers adjusted routes across West Asia and South Asia.
Scientists say the event is extraordinary. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program had no record of any Holocene-era eruption at Hayli Gubbi, classifying it as a volcano with “no known eruptions” in the last 11,700 years.
Hayli Gubbi sits in the geologically active Afar Rift, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart. The region is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity, but most recent eruptions have come from other systems such as Erta Ale and Dabbahu.
For now, local authorities in Afar are focused on immediate fallout: ash-covered roofs, contaminated water sources and withered pasture. With the eruption now subsided, according to VAAC Toulouse, officials are racing to assess long-term damage to livelihoods in one of Ethiopia’s poorest regions — and to prepare for the possibility that the volcano, awake after millennia, may not quickly fall silent again
