How old is the currently active shield volcano located in the Kaʻ ū Desert?
Kīlauea Kīlauea ( , ; ] ) is a currently active shield volcano in the Hawaiian Islands, and the most active of the five volcanoes that together form the island of Hawaiʻ i. Located along the southern shore of the island, the volcano is between 300,000 and 600,000 years old and emerged above sea level about 100,000 years ago. It is the second youngest product of the Hawaiian hotspot and the current eruptive center of the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain. Because it lacks topographic prominence and its activities historically coincided with those of Mauna Loa, Kīlauea was once thought to be a satellite of its much larger neighbor. Structurally, Kīlauea has a large, fairly recently formed caldera at its summit and two active rift zones, one extending 125 km east and the other 35 km west, as an active fault of unknown depth moving vertically an average of 2 to per year.
Hawaii hotspot The Hawaii hotspot is a volcanic hotspot located near the namesake Hawaiian Islands, in the northern Pacific Ocean. One of the most well-known and heavily studied hotspots in the world, the Hawaii plume is responsible for the creation of the Hawaiian – Emperor seamount chain, a chain of volcanoes over 5,800 kilometres (3,600 mi) long. Four of these volcanoes are active, two are dormant, and more than 123 are extinct, many having since been ground beneath the waves by erosion as seamounts and atolls. The chain extends from south of the island of Hawaiʻ i to the edge of the Aleutian Trench, near the eastern edge of Russia. While most volcanoes are created by geological activity at tectonic plate boundaries, the Hawaii hotspot is located far from plate boundaries. The classic hotspot theory, first proposed in 1963 by John Tuzo Wilson, proposes that a single, fixed mantle plume builds volcanoes that then, cut off from their source by the movement of the Pacific Plate, become increasingly inactive and eventually erode below sea level over millions of years. According to this theory, the nearly 60° bend where the Emperor and Hawaiian segments of the chain meet was caused by a sudden shift in the movement of the Pacific Plate. In 2003, fresh investigations of this irregularity led to the proposal of a mobile hotspot theory, suggesting that hotspots are mobile, not fixed, and that the 47-million-year-old bend was caused by a shift in the hotspot's motion rather than the plate's.