By Big3Africa Desk
For more than 10,000 years, the Hayli Gubbi volcano sat silent in the blistering heat of Ethiopia’s Afar region — a forgotten giant lying along the raw, torn seam of the East African Rift Valley. Generations lived and died without seeing a hint of activity. Scientists classified it as dormant. Locals barely spoke of it.
Then, on Sunday, November 23, 2025, the Earth cracked open.
Without warning, Hayli Gubbi erupted in a thunderous explosion, its first known eruption of the entire Holocene epoch, marking one of the most significant geological events in recent human history.
From its crater, the volcano hurled ash plumes soaring 45,000 feet (14 km) into the sky — high enough to disrupt global flight routes. The ash punched into the jet stream like a spear, carried rapidly across borders and oceans.
Within hours, satellites were tracking an ash cloud drifting over
the Red Sea → Yemen → Oman → Arabian Sea → Pakistan → India → China.
What began as a local eruption became an intercontinental atmospheric phenomenon, a reminder of how tightly connected our planet truly is.
Airlines scrambled. Air India, IndiGo, Akasa Air, and several Middle Eastern carriers cancelled and rerouted flights as aviation authorities warned of the lethal danger volcanic ash poses to jet engines.
Airports from Muscat to New Delhi issued advisories. Passengers were stranded. The global aviation network felt the pulse of a volcano thousands of kilometers away.
Back in the Afar region, the sky darkened as a fine gray rain began to fall.
Ash coated homes, water points, and grazing fields — a threat not to human life, thankfully, but to the livestock that communities depend on for survival. Goats and camels wandered through a landscape dusted in volcanic powder.
For scientists, Hayli Gubbi’s awakening was nothing short of extraordinary.
It offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the East African Rift — one of the few places on Earth where a new continent is slowly being born as tectonic plates pull apart.
Studying a volcano that has slept since before the dawn of written history is a chance to understand patterns that shape continents.
For the Afar people, the eruption was a moment of awe and uncertainty.
For aviation, a shockwave.
For the scientific world, a milestone.
And for the planet, a reminder that Earth’s deep forces never sleep — they simply wait.
A giant woke up after millennia.
And its breath swept across the world.
