|  |  |  | 

Exclusive News Sci-Tech

Scientists discovered world’s largest volcano beneath Pacific Ocean

Washington, Sep 11 (): Scientists discovered the dome-shaped behemoth single volcano, the world’s single largest volcano beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Lying 2km beneath the Pacific Ocean on an underwater plateau known as the Shatsky Rise, scientists named the volcano as the Tamu Massif and it is located  about 1,600 km east of Japan. It delves some 30 km (18 miles) into the Earth’s crust.

The journal Nature Geoscience says the 310,000 sq km Tamu Massif is comparable in size to Mars’ Olympus Mons volcano, the largest in the Solar System. Olympus Mons is the 800-pound gorilla of the solar system. The discovery tops the earlier world-record holder for the largest volcano, Mauna Loa, in the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Tamu Massif was formed around 145 million years ago when massive lava flows erupted from the Centre of the volcano to form a dome-shaped behemoth volcano. A team of geologists collected the data from rock samples that were recovered during the drilling of ocean-floor, provided by deep-penetration seismic scanners aboard a survey ship.

Clive Neal, a volcanologist at the University of Notre Dame said, “That’s probably a good thing, since we’ve been able to correlate mass extinction with some of these beasts.”

The researchers believe that the behemoth mass of Tamu Massif became extinct around the late Jurassic period and is not likely to erupt again.