The biggest volcano on Earth rivals Olympus Mons
Reports in this week's Nature Geoscience journal claim to have identified the largest single volcano on Earth. Using a combination of geophysical surveying, employing seismometers to image the subsurface structure of the Pacific ocean floor, alongside direct sampling of the crust by the Ocean Drilling Program drill cores, scientists from USA, Japan, and UK suggest that the Tamu massif, on the floor of the North West Pacific ocean, is in fact a huge submarine volcano. The Tamu Massif sits on a feature called the Shatsky rise, a large submarine plateau with an area similar to that of the state of California. It is dated at around 145 Myr old, and when it formed it would have stood at a triple junction of sea-floor plates.
The authors of the paper suggest that the feature is an immense "shield" volcano, formed from massive lava flows which would have flowed rapidly along its shallow slopes to create a broad-based but voluminous volcano. It is hundreds of miles across, and is the size of New Mexico.
This makes it comparable with Olympus Mons, a shield volcano on Mars, which is thought to be the largest volcano in the solar system.
The naming of Tamu Massif has its own story: the Massif is named after Texas A&M University, the home institution of the lead author of the study, William Sager.
Image: The Tamu Massif in 3D projection (Credit: IODP)
Original paper: Sager et al., Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1934
See more at http://www.geopoem.com/2013/09/immense-pacific-volcano-rivals-olympus.html
