The thought of remote volcanoes conjures up visions of ice covered peaks and hardy adventurers cutting their way through dense jungles. On Earth, most of the volcanoes are remote. Not because of some great distance from the nearest road but because of some great depth of water. Most of the world's volcanoes are on the ocean floor, the products of volcanism along mid-ocean ridges or above hot spots in the mantle. A new discovery has provided insights into these little known but very common type of volcanoes.

An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Colin Devey of the Geologish-Palaontologisches Institut, confirmed the existence of a 1,200 mile (2,000 km) long chain of volcanoes located southwest of Easter Island. This chain of submarine volcanoes is called the Foundation Seamounts. Jacqueline Mammerickx, an emeritus professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and co-leader of the German funded two month cruise in the South Pacific, reported that the volcanic chain is "one of the largest structures on the sea floor yet discovered." Mammerickx knew where to go looking. She used radar scanning data from U.S. Navy satellites to detect variations in the height of ocean surfaces and the presence of undersea structures. Roger Hekinian, a French oceanographer and co-leader of the expedition, said a visit to the site was needed to confirm the existence of the volcanoes. Not only did the scientific team confirm the existence and location of the chain but they also photographed and sampled 37 different volcanoes. Some of the volcanoes rise 13,000 feet (4,000 m) above the sea floor.

The team suspects that the volcanoes originated above a hot spot, an area of anomalous magma in the mantle. The Hawaii-Emperor volcanic chain is the best known example of hot spot volcanism. The team will return to the Foundation Seamounts next winter. They plan to pinpoint the location of the hot spot and sample the young volcanoes directly above it. Since the magma that feeds the hot spot originated deep beneath the surface these samples will provide insights into an even more remote place, the interior of the Earth.

Summarized by Steve Mattox from a news brief in Science, v. 268, 12 May 1995, p. 809.

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