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An Island Grows in Hawaii

Hawaii is gaining real estate. An underwater volcano, named Loihi, is being pushed up, and now, about 100,000 years after it began rising, its crest is within half a mile of the surface. This is the birth of an island. Robert Bodnar, a volcano expert at Virginia Tech, jokingly suggests that his students should buy the watery property. "Then wait," Bodnar told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Sometime within the next 100,000 years, you may own a tropical resort island." Geologists have come to understand the underwater birth of Hawaiian islands only in the last 10 years. The islands are formed as the Pacific Plate moves over a hot spot in Earth's mantle. As the plate glides across, the hot spot melts rocks, causes earthquakes, and pushes up volcanos, some of which become islands.

Molten lava piles up in the ocean where it may eventually be part of a new island. Photo courtesy of Hawaii Center of Volcanology

Researchers will be able to watch the growth of Hawaii's youngest island with an NSF-funded, underwater observatory called the Hawaii Undersea Geology Observatory, or HUGO. With data-collecting cables located right where the action is -- such as, earthquakes, lava flows and gas expulsions -- volcanologists expect to collect never-before-seen details of an island's ascent from the seafloor.