How can a seamount become an island

This Yellowstone Volcano has been dated to be as old as 2,, years old, and throughout that lifetime has erupted on average every ,, years. This is heat that you can't stand , you have to get back otherwise blisters start to form. It is hot enough that you can't accidentally step on active lava. They are dangerous not as much because of the radiant heat from the lava inside but because of the super-heated plume of air coming out. Magma is hotter than lava , depending on how recently the lava reached the surface and if the magma and lava are from the same magma chamber below the….

While lava can be as hot as F , some flames can be much hotter, such as F or more, while a candle flame can be as low as F. Lava is hotter than a typical wood or coal-buring fire, but some flames, such as that of an acetylene torch, is hotter than lava. Rocks that solidify from melted material are igneous rocks, so lake ice can be classified as igneous.

If you get technical, it also means that water could be classified as lava. Since it is on the surface, it is technically lava.

Slowly, slowly, the Big Island of Hawaii is sinking toward its doom. It is there that one huge moving slab of the Earth's crust, called the Pacific plate, moves the islands along toward their fate a few inches each century.

There is nothing more quintessential to Hawaii than its iconic beaches and idyllic scenery. Research published by the state of Hawaii suggests that by , we can expect 3. Could a seamount become a volcanic island? Asked by: Emil Kling V. Can Hawaii island sink? What is the difference between magma and lava? What is the largest volcano in the world?

At the same time, sediment "rains" down from above, slowly burying them over millions of years. As a result, especially tall seamounts may occur as isolated features rising from the abyssal plain. This is the deep, flat section of the ocean floor far removed from an oceanic ridge, where sediments are often thousands of feet thick.

Somewhat closer to an oceanic ridge, where sediments are not so thick, the tops of partially buried seamounts form what are called abyssal hills. Some seamounts are very tall, broad volcanic features with gentle slopes, known as shield volcanoes.

Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii is a good example. It rises over 32, ft 10, m above the ocean floor, making Mauna Kea—not Mt. Everest in the Himalayas—the world's highest mountain. The ascending column may be on the order of kilometers to tens of kilometers across, but near the surface it spreads out to create a mushroom-style head that is several tens to over kilometers across.

Near the base of the lithosphere the rigid part of the mantle , the mantle plume and possibly some of the surrounding mantle material partially melts to form magma that rises to feed volcanoes. A great example of seamounts created from a hot spot includes the Hawaiian and Emperor Seamount island chains in the Pacific Ocean Figure 4. The volcanic rock making up these islands gets progressively younger toward the southeast, culminating with the island of Hawaii itself, which consists of rock that is almost all younger than 1 Ma.

It appears that a stationary plume of hot upwelling mantle material is the source of the Hawaiian volcanism, and that the ocean crust of the Pacific Plate is moving toward the northwest over this hot spot. A seamount will be formed through volcanic activity over the hot spot, then the plate will move and displace the seamount before the hot spot produces the next seamount, and so on.

In this way, over time, the seamounts are formed in chains. Near the Midway Islands, the chain takes a pronounced change in direction, from northwest-southeast for the Hawaiian Islands to nearly north-south for the Emperor Seamounts.

This change is widely ascribed to a change in direction of the Pacific Plate moving over the stationary mantle plume, but it is also possible that the Hawaiian mantle plume has not actually been stationary throughout its history, and in fact moved at least 2, km south over the period between 81 and 45 Ma.

Since most mantle plumes are beneath the oceans, the early stages of volcanism typically take place on the seafloor. Over time, very large islands may form like those in Hawaii.