Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/06/heres-how-the-hawaiian-isl.html
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pillow lava goes to sleep for hundreds and hundreds of our years
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Hawaii is just part of a much larger chain called the Hawaii-Emperor Seamount chain which reaches almost to Kamchatka and dates back at least 85 million years, possibly older but the earlier volcanoes have all been subducted.
There’s a massive kink in the chain in the mid Pacific where the trend changes from WNW as at present to NNW. This was once thought to be down to a change in the movement of the Pacific Plate, but it is quite possible that the Mantle Plume driving the hotspot moved southwards. If that’s the case, it’ll be a significant discovery for geologists, most of whom have considered Mantle Plumes to be essentially fixed in place with the overlying plates doing all the movement.
Getting a good map of the ocean floor will show lots of seamount chains - largely in the Pacific and Indian oceans, each driven by a plume:
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85 million years ago, Xenu parked his spaceship but left the engine running. It melted its way into the mantle and sits down there on idle. (The idle is a bit rough because it’s way past the recommended tune-up date.) /s
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