Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday
on Twitter One of the mysteries of Earth science is hotspots.
While most volcanoes are found at plate boundaries, where two
tectonic plates are rubbing against each other, volcanic
hotspots can be anywhere, even in the middle of continents. What
causes volcanic hotspots? One theory is the idea of a mantle
plume. A mantle plume is kind of like what’s going on inside a
lava lamp. As the light heats up the wax in a lava lamp, it
rises up through the oil in large blobs. These blobs reach the
top of the lamp, cool and then sink back down to be heated up
again. Inside the Earth, the core of the Earth is very hot, and
heats up the surrounding mantle. Heat convection in the mantle
slowly transports heat from the core up to the Earth’s surface.
These rising columns of heat can come up anywhere, and not just
at the plate boundaries. Geologists did fluid dynamic
experiments to try and simulate mantle plumes, and they found
they formed long thin conduits to