Underwater volcano is Earth's biggest
Source: Nature
Underwater volcano is Earth's biggest
Alexandra Witze
05 September 2013
Geophysicists have discovered what they say is the largest single volcano on Earth, a 650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.
The megavolcano has been inactive for some 140 million years. But its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface. It also shows that Earth can produce volcanoes on par with Olympus Mons on Mars, which, at 625 kilometres across, was until now the biggest volcano known in the Solar System.
“This says that here on Earth we have analogous volcanoes to the big ones we find on Mars,” says William Sager, a marine geologist at the University of Houston in Texas. “I’m not sure anybody would have guessed that.” Sager and his colleagues describe the structure, named Tamu Massif, in Nature Geoscience on 8 September1. ‘Tamu’ 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 kilometres east of Japan, formed near a junction where three plates of Earth’s crust once pulled apart.
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Read more: http://www.nature.com/news/underwater-volcano-is-earth-s-biggest-1.13680
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