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The puzzle of the South Pacific

Nature volume 389, pages 439–440 (1997)Cite this article

Since the advent of plate-tectonic theory in the 1960s, numerous attempts have been made to find order in the complicated distribution of islands and seamounts in the South Pacific. Progress has been hindered by the remoteness of the region from oceanic institutions, and hence a lack of hard data. On page 479of this issue1, Marcia McNutt and her co-workers present high-resolution data from this area which, they believe, runs counter to conventional plume theory.

McNutt's group did not find the expected age progression in their area, a 3° by 3° region in the Cook-Austral chain near the Macdonald seamount. Rather they find three chains of volcanic edifices of which the oldest two were previously unsuspected (see Fig. 1 on page 480). The oldest, the Ngatemato chain, is about 30 million years old, and it erupted on a seafloor that was then 10 million years old; the Taukina chain is slightly younger; and the well-known Macdonald chain has erupted in the past 5 million years.

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Figure 1: Standard hotspot theory (a), and variations on it (b, c), that might explain McNutt and colleagues' data1 on the Cook-Austral chain of volcanoes in the South Pacific.

References

  1. McNutt, M. K., Caress, D. W., Reynolds, J., Jordahl, K. A. & Duncan, R. A. Nature 389, 479–482 (1997).

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  1. the Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305-2215, California, USA

    Norman Sleep

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  1. Norman Sleep
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Sleep, N. The puzzle of the South Pacific. Nature 389, 439–440 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/38883

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