This is now the world's largest volcano, geologists say

[Judi Lynn]

A fresh look at the underwater mountain Tamu Massif shows that it no longer holds the record, since it may not be a volcano at all.
5 MINUTE READ
BY ROBIN GEORGE ANDREWS

PUBLISHED JULY 15, 2019

In 2013, a team of scientists rocked geology fans when they reported that Mauna Loa, a 2,000-square-mile shield volcano in Hawaii, was probably not in fact the largest volcano in the world. That accolade, the team suggested, belonged to Tamu Massif, an extinct volcanic mountain on the seafloor east of Japan that appeared to be a single shield volcano covering a whopping 100,000 square miles, roughly the same size as the state of Arizona.

But now, a study in Nature Geoscience has re-examined Tamu Massif and come to a very different conclusion: It’s not a shield volcano at all, which means Mauna Loa wins back the crown. And in a twist, the lead author on both studies is the same person: William Sager, a marine geophysicist at the University of Houston.

“That’s awesome, because that’s how science should work,” says Bill Chadwick, a seafloor geologist at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Oregon who was not involved with the study. “You go with what the evidence is telling you, regardless of the fact that it contradicts something you believed before.”

Sager agrees, noting that his team’s revised look at the massive undersea structure reveals it may instead be a colossal pileup of oceanic crust that currently cannot be adequately explained, something perhaps even stranger than a singular giant volcano.

More:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/07/worlds-largest-volcano-mauna-loa-tamu-massif-earth-oceans/