This sad end to the tropical islands as we know them is being revealed in a geologic saga playing out deep on the ocean floor. It is there that one huge moving slab of the Earth's crust, called the Pacific plate, moves the islands along toward their fate a few inches each century.
And it is there that a great "hot spot" of magma, created by the fiery heat of the Earth's core 1, miles beneath the seabed, is fueling the replacement islands with magma, while the massive plate itself is twisting slowly toward the west. The Berkeley scientists and their many colleagues have chronicled these island and plate movements with data painstakingly acquired by researchers at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, aboard research vessels roaming the far Pacific, at the U.
Geological Survey's paleomagnetism lab in Menlo Park, and at Stanford and many other research centers. The moving hot spot formed them, the plate carries them, and over time they will all disappear. Sharp and David Clague, a marine geologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, reported on new clues to the process in a recent issue of the journal Science.
And earlier, geophysicist David Scholl of Stanford and the USGS led a research group concluding that the great "Hawaiian Hot Spot" is not fixed in one place, as scientists previously believed, but actually moved southward between 47 million and 81 million years ago. The reports add fresh insights into the dynamic behavior of the entire Earth's crust, where vast tectonic plates are constantly moving against each other to cause volcanoes, earthquakes and the formation of new land masses.
When the Hawaiian islands disappear in the distant future, they won't be the first to go, for they are just one part of a long chain of volcanoes that rose from the Pacific floor and vanished, one after another, over millions of years.
For example, Midway Island, part of the Hawaiian chain, was once a volcano, too. Now it is only a coral atoll barely above sea level, with two small, flat islands that held Navy runways during World War II. University of California - Berkeley.
Hawaiian biodiversity has been declining for millions of years: Shrinking land area crowds species, leading to long-term diversity loss on older islands. Retrieved November 12, from www. These land-use changes play an important role for nutrition, climate, and biodiversity. Scientists have now combined satellite It is on islands where animals evolve in isolation, often for millions of years, with different food sources, competitors, predators, and Furthermore, they found that introduced species are diluting the effects of island age on ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.
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