MAIN MENU Home Map Gallery Links For more information please contact Steven Golden.

The Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment (PLUME) is a two-year, multi-institutional University of Hawaii, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Yale University) experiment to image seismically the deep roots of the Hawaiian hotspot. While scientists have long studied shallow volcanic processes at Kilauea and Loihi, we do not understand the deep processes that built the Hawaiian Islands over millions of years. One hypothesis is that there is a plume of hot, buoyant material, which rises from the Earth's deep interior and partially melts, leading to sustained volcanism at the surface. Alternatives to a deeply rooted plume have also been proposed. The mantle beneath the Hawaiian hotspot can be imaged by seismic waves, which slow as they travel through hotter material. A large network of land and ocean-bottom seismometers was deployed on and around the Hawaiian Islands from 2005 to 2007 to record seismograms from distant earthquakes around the world. The construction of the three-dimensional images of P wave and S wave velocity beneath the Hawaiian hotspot from these records is now underway.