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poke out of the sea 590 mi ( 952 kilometre ) nor'-west of Honolulu , Hawaii , two barren peaks put up their heads . The piffling pinnacles , which stand about 170 animal foot ( 52 time ) above sea level at their highest peak , bely a grievous mass of ancient magma beneath them . twist out , these two unassuming nubbin are really the tip of Pūhāhonu — the undivided largest vent onEarth , scientist have found .
Pūhāhonu — meaning " polo-neck rising for breath " in Hawaiian — is part of the long chain of undersea batch andvolcanoesthat stretch from the Hawaiian Islands to the eastern bound of Russia . Many of the chain ’s 120 - or - so volcanoes are long dead and buried beneath the waves , though the comparatively untried top that make up the Hawaiian Islands still hulk over the land ( and , occasionally , fumble their top ) .
The Gardner Pinnacles are all that’s visible of what is now considered the world’s largest, and hottest, volcano. It’s called Pūhāhonu, and it lies northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii.
Mauna Loa , the softly - slosh behemoth that bulge out of Hawaii ’s Big Island , has long been designated the world ’s large volcano . From its al-Qaeda on the seafloor to its summit thou of feet over the island , Mauna Loa rises more than 30,000 feet ( 9,170 molarity ) — making it technically tall thanMount Everest — and encompasses more than 19,200 cubic miles ( 80,000 three-dimensional km ) in book . There ’s no interrogative sentence it ’s gargantuan ; however , researchers now claim that Pūhāhonu really has Mauna Loa beat — thanks largely to tens of G of three-dimensional mile of volcanic tilt buried beneath the ocean floor .
tie in : pic : Fiery lava from Kilauea vent erupts on Hawaii ’s Big Island
In the raw cogitation , these researchers used echo sounder and gravitation sensing element to quantify Pūhāhonu ’s entire topographic footprint , from the wee peaks stand over the sea to the cryptic careen sinking hundreds of feet below the Earth ’s crust . The team found that Pūhāhonu incorporate some 36,000 cubic miles ( 150,000 cubic km ) of rock’n’roll — giving it a bulk more than twice that of Mauna Loa .
These two little peaks, called the Gardner Pinnacles, are all that is visible of the world’s largest volcano.
Only a fraction of that book — about 30 % — is visible above the seafloor , the team wrote ; the rest stabs so profoundly undercover , that Pūhāhonu has really caused the crust beneath it to sink by hundreds of miles over the 14 million - year - or - so since the volcano take shape .
" The Modern intensity figuring demonstrate that Pūhāhonu is substantially with child than any other Hawaiian volcano including Mauna Loa , which was dare to be the declamatory volcano on Earth , " the researcher wrote in the bailiwick , to be release in the July 15 issuing of the journalEarth and Planetary Science Letters .
The findings get even hotter — Not only does that make Pūhāhonu the largest vent on Earth by book , but it may also be one of the hottest , the researchers wrote . As part of their study , the squad examined several samples of olivine — a mineral that forms when magma chill and crystallizes — collected from various parts of the volcano . From the olivine ’s composition , the squad inferred the temperature of the vent ’s magma before it effloresce . They count on that Pūhāhonu ’s magma must have been about 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit ( 1,700 point Anders Celsius ) when it first flowed — giving the vent the hottest memorialise magma on Earth .
Not big for a bantam turtle point .
Originally publish onLive scientific discipline .
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