Scientists have found an undersea plateau, bigger than the western Indian state of Gujarat and positioned within the Pacific Ocean, has been rising in measurement for the reason that dinosaur age or Cretaceous interval (145 to 66 million years in the past). Printed within the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the analysis has discovered that the Melanesian Border Plateau was shaped by way of 4 separate pulses of volcanism, all with completely different root causes. The Melanesian Border Plateau is positioned east of the Solomon Islands.
Based on examine chief Kevin Konrad, a geoscientist on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas, finding out the timeline of the formation of the plateau is essential, “as a result of large volcanic options beneath the ocean are sometimes poorly understood.”
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“There are some options within the Pacific basin the place [scientists] have solely a single pattern, and it seems like a really massive huge single occasion,” Konrad was quoted as saying by Stay Science.
“Typically once we pattern these options intimately, we notice they’re truly constructed over a number of pulses over tens of thousands and thousands of years and would not have important environmental impacts,” he added.
In 2013, Konrad and his group extensively explored the Melanesian Border Plateau, utilising a classy chain contraption to extract rocks from the undersea mountains and volcanoes comprising the plateau.
Plateau’s formation: An in depth timeline
Upon analysing the ages and chemistry of those rocks, scientists revealed that the plateau’s formation began round 120 million years in the past. Robbie Ridge, a substrate rock layer, doubtless shaped throughout an enormous basaltic lava flood, creating a considerable undersea plateau.
Roughly 45 million years in the past, this plateau part, often called Robbie Ridge, drifted over a mantle hotspot—zones with heated materials inflicting volcanic exercise.
The Rurutu-Arago hotspot, persisting beneath French Polynesia, remodeled the plateau into an undersea mountain chain, or seamount, with islands rising above the ocean floor. Regardless of erosion, the seamount ultimately shifted over one other hotspot, the Samoa hotspot, at the moment shaping the Samoan Islands since round 13 million years in the past.
“All those self same conduits that magma used to undergo 45 million years in the past, they’re now preexisting weaknesses that magma can begin shifting by way of 13 million years in the past,” Konrad mentioned.
(With inputs from companies)
