The Hawaiian Islands have long been a textbook example of how a tectonic plate drifts over a fixed hot spot, resulting in a chain of volcanoes. However, this model fails to explain the thousands of underwater mountains, or seamounts, scattered across the ocean floor. In an attempt to solve this mystery, geologists have turned to computer simulations to rewind the slow churn of Earth's interior over 270 million years. The results reveal that these seamounts are not random but are instead the cooling signature of plumes that spread their heat and fade over hundreds of millions of years. This finding provides a unified explanation for the formation of both orderly chains and scattered seamounts, turning the ocean basins into a record of where deep heat once pooled. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, offers a new perspective on the formation of underwater mountains and opens up new avenues for research in this field.
