Giant volcano discovery may be only the beginning

An underwater volcano was found some 1,000 miles east of Japan It was reported today by CNN and referred to William Sager, a professor at the University of Houston, who led a team of scientists in the

An underwater volcano was found some 1,000 miles east of Japan It was reported today by CNN and referred to William Sager, a professor at the University of Houston, who led a team of scientists in the discovery.

The volcano is about the size of the state of New Mexico and is among the largest in the Solar System, Sager says.

Tamu Massif covers an area of about 120,000 square miles.

The volcano is about 145 million years old and hadn’t been active for about 140 million years.

โ€œThis says that here on Earth we have analogous volcanoes to the big ones we find on Mars,โ€ says William Sager, a marine geologist at the University of Houston in Texas. โ€œIโ€™m not sure anybody would have guessed that.โ€ Sager and his colleagues describe the structure, named Tamu Massif, in Nature Geoscience on 8 September1. โ€˜Tamuโ€™ is an acronym for Texas A&M University in College Station, where Sager was formerly employed.

Tamu Massif has been long known as one of three large mountains that make up an underwater range called the Shatsky Rise. The rise, about 1,500 kilometers east of Japan, formed near a junction where three plates of Earthโ€™s crust once pulled apart.

Shallow rock cores from Tamu had previously revealed that it was made of lava. But geologists thought that the mountain, which rises 4 kilometers from the sea floor, might have built up from several volcanoes erupting such that their lava merged into one pile. The islands of Hawaii and Iceland were built this way.

Sager and his colleagues were startled by findings they made after sailing the research vessel Marcus G. Langseth over Tamu in 2010 and 2012. They used air guns to send seismic waves through the mountain, and monitored the reflections. The seismic waves penetrated several kilometers into the massif โ€” and showed that all of its lava flows dipped away from the volcanoโ€™s summit, implying a central magma vent. โ€œFrom whatever angle you look at it, the lava flows appear to come from the center of this thing,โ€ says Sager.

Over time, the lava coursed downhill and then solidified, building up a volcano with a long, low profile similar to that of a shield laid on the ground. The worldโ€™s biggest active shield volcano, Mauna Loa on Hawaii, has an area footprint just 15% of Tamuโ€™s โ€” but Mauna Loa is taller, rising 9 kilometers from sea floor to summit.

Scott Bryan, a geologist at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, warns that not all of Tamu may have come from a single magma vent. There could be separate sources, deeper than the seismic waves penetrated, that could have oozed out lava and inflated the mountain from below, he says.

Because ship time is at a premium, the study is one of the first to peer at the internal geometry of these massive underwater mountains. It is possible that other mega-volcanoes are waiting to be discovered. โ€œThere may be bigger ones out there,โ€ says Sager.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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