Submersible exploration of the Samoan hotspot revealed a new, 300-m-tall, volcanic cone, named Nafanua, in the summit crater of Vailulu’u seamount. Nafanua grew from the 1,000-m-deep crater floor in <4 years and could reach the sea surface within decades. Vents fill Vailulu’u crater with a thick suspension of particulates and...
Vailulu’u seamount is an active underwater volcano that marks the end of the Samoan hotspot trail (Hart et al., 2000). Vailulu’u has a simple conical morphology (Figure 1) with a largely enclosed volcanic crater at relatively shallow water depths, ranging from 590 m (highest point on the crater rim) to...
The geologic processes at work in American Samoa have long been a point of scientific debate. Of its numerous volcanic formations, few breach sea level, leaving an enormous proportion of their mass unavailable to traditional observation. This study aims to describe the deep sea geomorphology of American Samoa through compilation,...
The Sr, Nd, and Pb isotopic compositions of five Cretaceous guyots (Limalok, Lo-En, Wodejebato, MIT, and Takuyo-Daisan) within the West Pacific Seamount Province (WPSP) indicate that they originated from geochemically enriched mantle sources. They are characterized by large isotopic variations in Pb (²⁰⁶Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 18.58-19.80, ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 15.55-15.68, and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁴Pb...
South Pacific intraplate volcanoes have been active since the Early Cretaceous. Their HIMU-EMI-EMII mantle sources can be traced back into the West Pacific Seamount Province (WPSP) using plate tectonic reconstructions, implying that these distinctive components are enduring features within the Earth's mantle for, at least, the last 120 Myr. These...
Seamounts are ubiquitous features of the seafloor that form part of the fabric of oceanic crust. When a seamount enters a subduction zone, it has a major affect on forearc morphology, the uplift history of the island arc, and the structure of the downgoing slab. It is not known, however,...
Seamount research, more often than not,
is carried out by highly specialized science
teams with narrowly focused science objectives.
As a result, different seamount science
disciplines often do not collaborate or are
not even aware of each other. However, it is
obvious that interdisciplinary collaboration
is the most successful approach...
Many Earth science disciplines are currently experiencing the emergence of new ways of data
publication and the establishment of an information technology infrastructure for data archiving and
exchange. Building on efforts to standardize data and metadata publication in geochemistry [Staudigel et
al., 2002], here we discuss options for data publication,...
The issue of permanent nondipole contributions to the time-averaged field lies at the very heart of
paleomagnetism and the study of the ancient geomagnetic field. In this paper we focus on paleomagnetic
directional results from igneous rocks of the southwestern U.S.A. in the age range 0–5 Ma and investigate
both...
Large igneous provinces (LIPs) and intraplate seamounts reflect of anomalous mantle melting and illuminate interior processes of the Earth. These features are in all ocean basins and show the mantle’s evolution over time, then can provide information on plate tectonic processes, such as plate motion over time, spreading ridge formation,...