Canary Islands Eruption Could Create New Land

Incidentally, what are the chances they'll just end up with an atoll? Would this land rush be damp squib?

Zero. An atoll is made up of coral, not volcanic rock.

I believe that answer is actually much greater than zero (possibly 1.00), depending upon the the allowed timescale. Coral atolls are formed on top of old volcanices.

From the last the last of the following links:

"In 1842 Darwin explained the creation of coral atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean based upon observations made during a five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Accepted as basically correct, his explanation involved considering that several tropical island types?from high volcanic island, through barrier reef island, to atoll?represented a sequence of gradual subsidence of what started as an oceanic volcano. He reasoned that a fringing coral reef surrounding a volcanic island in the tropical sea will grow upwards as the island subsides (sinks), becoming an "almost atoll", or barrier reef island, as typified by an island such as Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, Bora Bora and others in the Society Islands. The fringing reef becomes a barrier reef for the reason that the outer part of the reef maintains itself near sea level through biotic growth, while the inner part of the reef falls behind, becoming a lagoon because conditions are less favorable for the coral and calcareous algae responsible for most reef growth. In time, subsidence carries the old volcano below the ocean surface and the barrier reef remains. At this point, the island has become an atoll."

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Atoll [eoearth.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Hawaiian_volcanoes [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll [wikipedia.org]

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/lUMIQpblaIE/canary-islands-eruption-could-create-new-land

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