The Hawaiian Islands were formed and are still currently sitting on a large interior hot spot dating back to millions of years ago. A hot spot is simply when magma rises from the mantle comes either to or almost to the surface at locations that may not be anywhere near a plate boundary. Sitting on Lithosphere hot spots are the casue of a lot of Hawaii's volcanic activity.
The state of Hawaii sits in the middle of the Pacific Plate in the Pacific Ocean, at 105 million square kilometers, it is the largest tectonic plate in the world. Plate techtonics is a theory that describes the large scale motions of "plates" on the Earth's Lithosphere. The Pacific plate interacts with a plethora of the other plates surrounding it. On It's left side the Pacific Plate interacts with the Indo-Australian forming a convergent boundary, while on the north side of the plate another convergent boundary is formed with the North American Plate.
Hawaii is the home to several volcanos but only few are active. Each Hawaiian island is made of at least one volcano, which first erupted on
the sea floor and only emerged above the ocean's surface after countless
eruptions. On the big island, Hawai'i there are 2 active volcanos named Kilauea, and Mauna Loa. As we discussed, hot spots are the main cause of volcanos.
Mauna Loa. Which happens to be a large sheild volcano.
Hawaii is the home to active volcanos like Mauna Loa
(the biggest volcano in Hawaii), Kilauea, and Loihi. But also many inactive
volcanos like Haulalai, Mauna Kea and Wanianae. Hawaii has many shield
volcanos, which are flatter than all other types of volcanos. The other types
of volcanos are, “composite” and “cinder cone”. This explains the liquid
flowing lava (which is referred to as Pahoehoe) that comes from eruptions from
Mauna Loa. Believe it or not, several of the Hawaiian Islands are actually the
tops of shield volcano’s that formed on top of hot spots like we discussed
earlier!
This is an image of Kilauea in mid eruption.
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