Source: Nature: "Violent Hawaii"
Major corporate support for the Nature collection was provided by Canon U.S.A. and SC Johnson. Additional support was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the nation’s public television stations.
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The Hawaiian Islands owe their existence to a hot spot in the Earth's mantle located beneath the southeastern part of Hawaii. An outpouring of lava fed by the hot spot built volcanoes that eventually grew above sea level and formed islands. This video segment from Nature shows how the Hawaiian island chain was created.
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Volcanoes form when magma from beneath the Earth’s crust breaks through the surface and erupts. As the erupting lava cools, new islands are created. Every several thousand years, a new island emerges from the sea. It is immediately exposed to winds and rain that erode its surface, but seeds and spores, blown by the wind, become embedded in the newly-formed soil. In a relatively short period of time, the barren rock surface is transformed into a lush tropical island. Today, lava flows from active volcanoes can provide information about underground magma flow, yielding information about potential future eruptions. In spite of scientific advances, however, there is not yet a method for predicting volcanic eruptions with complete accuracy.
Hawaii’s volcanoes did more than sculpt the landscape. They actually built the islands from scratch.
The Hawaiian chain sits atop the Pacific plate, a shifting block of the earth’s crust. Beneath the plate lies a stationary hot spot. It produces a column of magma, creating volcanoes that gradually rise above the sea to form islands.
As the plate slowly drifts northwest, each island in turn is pulled away from the hot spot, and the volcanoes are extinguished.
The hot spot now sits twenty miles south of the big island, where it’s creating a new volcano named Loihi.
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