(UPDATED*) Hawaii Press: Mystery of the Hawaii-Emperor Sea Mount Hot Spot solved?
Last Friday’s Science has featured on its cover what appears to be a big story on how our planet’s innards work and roil: the tracing of a plume of hot material to 1500 km or about 1000 miles down, right under the south end of the Hawaiian archipelago. That’s pretty deep in the mantle, and more than twice as deep as such data have identified what looks like a plume before. So an old idea that the rising magma’s source is somewhere near the core-mantle boundary – around 2000 miles down – gains heft. And the larger picture of the Pacific Plate being blistered by this plume – and leaving a train of islands and sea mounts stretching thousands of miles from near Asia to the Big Island of Hawaii where the blister is still leaking lava – gains focus too.
It’s a natural story for the Hawaiian press, which ran stories. Other than that, not much. (But see UPDATE below for one other/CP). That major wire services and mainline newspapers haven’t much on it may be understandable. It’s a bit incremental – cementing further an idea that already was the most convincing. Plus, reporters who cover science are distracted by little things like the big climate meeting in Denmark. Harder to understand is the the quiet among science-specialty outlets. One would think the services from Science News, Nat’l Geographic, Sci. American, etc. would sit up. There is a long history of debate between adherents to the deep megaplume idea and those who suspected the plume may have a shallower foot. Seems pretty interesting to The Tracker.
Another possible reason for the low interest that’s not particularly favorable to journalists: Neither the article in Science, nor most of the several press releases from the NSF and others (see Grist), provide a snappy artist’s rendition of the plume that the seismic data imply. The Scripps release has a very simple drawing that has no scale. The journal article paper has a series of horizontal slices through the Earth’s crust and mantle at various depths, none of which are particularly clean in meaning to inexpert eyes. But an artist could have stacked them up and made a 3-D representation. Reporters and editors ought to figure that out for themselves – but a pretty-picture nudge from savvy p.r. pros can help.
Stories:
- Honolulu Advertiser – Christie Watson: Science backs Hawaii’s hot-spot origin theory / Seafloor seismometers paint a picture of magma plume deep under isles ; Pretty good perspective in the lede – Hawaiian school kids already, as they have for years, learn of this theory in class. Watson also spells out the test’s name, one of the relative minority of contrived initials that work: PLUME, for Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment.
Honolulu Star-Bulletin – Helen Altonn: Undersea hot spot . Images from quakes give a clearer picture of activity below the isle, and Hawaii’s origin ; Her lede is that a mystery is now unraveled – it being the one of how a 75-million year old geologic formation came to be. It runs with one of the images in the journal article, and an author of that paper. The red blob is the region of low shear wave velocity, an implication of hot, plastic, maybe partly melted stuff.- ANI (Asian News International, via the Daily India): Hawaiian hot spot’s deep roots uncovered by scientists ; circulated world wide – but is a straight lift from the UC San Diego/ Scripps press release in Grist below ;
- Hawaii News Now (a news service of the Honolulu CBC and NBC outlets) – Duane Shimogawa: New imagery uncovers how the Hawaiian Islands were formed ; Not a particularly coherent rendition of the news - a transcript of a scattershot and short broadcast.
- *UPDATE: NY Times – Henry Fountain (Tue Dec 8): Underwater data back up theory of Hawaii’s origin ;
Grist for the Mill:
Carnegie Institution Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; Univ. Hawaii-Manoa Press Release ; US San Diego/Scripps Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
