Barren Island is the only active volcano in India and the only active volcano along a series of volcanoes from Sumatra to Myanmar. The 1158-foot-high island is part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The volcano first erupted 1.6 million years ago and sits on a 106-million year-old oceanic crust. The first recorded eruption dates back to 1787; since then, it has erupted more than ten times. In 1991, Barren Island experienced a massive eruption that lasted six months and destroyed the fauna, resulting in fewer bird species and their population. True to its name, it has large areas of barren landscape and is uninhabited by humans. A small population of goats, birds, flying foxes, and a few rodent species are known to survive the harsh conditions. The pristine waters around the island have Manta rays, basalt formations, and exotic coral reefs. Visitors can only view the island from a distance by boat or ferry.
The formation of the volcano dates back to 1.8 million years ago when a subduction-related volcano (created near the tectonic boundary of the Indo-Australian plate and Eurasian plate) breached the seafloor of the Indian ocean. The explosive eruptions started building andesite lava from 2.2 km below the ocean surface. The volcanic activity continued for one million years transforming more and more lava into rocks and eventually climbing up to the ocean surface, more than some 70,000 years ago. Eruptions became less violent afterwards. Then, some 61,000 years ago, the volcano erupted violently emitting 15-km-high plumes of ash and a volume of magma so large within a week that usually took hundreds of years to come out. This caused the centre of the volcano to collapse, forming a 2-km-wide caldera.
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