![]() Native Hawaiian oral traditions record the extraordinary eruptive history of Kilauea long before European and American missionaries wrote about it in their journals. Here, lava from a 2004 Kilauea eruption flows into the sea. Hot magma deep within Earth may have heated carbon-rich rocks, releasing methane into the atmosphere and leading to an ancient warming event, scientists suggest. Nothing in earth science is perfect,” Wolfe observed. Wolfe acknowledges the importance of the new find, but believes it will take much more work to truly explain how her thermal plume and the “pancake” of hot rocks are related and how they provide the heat source for Kilauea and the other active volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands. This data suggests that hotspots may not be as deep as previously thought and may not be permanently fixed in one spot. Temperatures were 300 to 400 degrees C (572 to 752 F) hotter than expected at that depth. Instead, they found a “pancake shaped” layer of abnormally hot rock in the crust only about 403 miles beneath the surface, well above the mantle. ![]() They could find no evidence of a single thermal plume. In contrast, a new study done by geologists from MIT and Purdue University in 2011, mapped rock layers within the crust. She believes her evidence has pinpointed the location of the hotspot. ![]() In 2009, Cecily Wolfe of the University of Hawaii used sea bottom sensors to identify how seismic waves propagate through the pliable mantle layer beneath the Earth’s crust. As the Pacific plate continues to move northward over time, the island is pushed away from the hotspot and a new island begins to form over the hotspot.
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