Sean Solomon and Erik Hauri are coauthors on a paper, led by former DTM fellow Cecily Wolfe, appearing in the 4 December 2009 issue of Science that provides an unprecedented glimpse of the roots of the Hawaiian “hot spot.” This work is the product of an ambitious project known as PLUME (Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment)—which involved the collection and analysis of two years of data from sea floor and land-based seismometers. The paper features the first high-resolution images of the shear-wave velocity structure beneath the Hawaiian Islands, the most volcanically active hot spot on Earth. The seismic images provide new evidence that the hot spot is underlain by a mantle plume extending to at least 1,500 km depth.

“One of the reasons it has taken so long to create these kinds of images is because many of the major hot spots are located in the middle of the oceans, where it has been difficult to put seismic instruments,” Solomon commented, “The Hawaiian region is also distant from most of the earthquake zones that are the sources of seismic waves that are used to create images. Hawaii has been the archetype of a volcanic hotspot and yet the deep structure of Hawaii has remained poorly resolved. For this study we were able to take advantage of a new generation of long-lived broadband seismic instruments that could be set out on the seafloor for periods of a year at a time.”

For more information, see the CIW press release.