How long will a volcanic island live?
When a hot plume of rock rises through the Earth’s mantle to puncture the overlying crust, it can create not only a volcanic ocean island, but also a swell in the ocean floor hundreds to thousands of kilometers long. Over time the island is carried away by the underlying tectonic plate, and the plume pops out another island in its place. Over millions of years, this geological hotspot can produce a chain of trailing islands, on which life may flourish temporarily before the islands sink, one by one, back into the sea. The Earth is pocked with dozens of hotspots, including those that produced the island chains of Hawaii and the Galapagos. While the process by which volcanic islands form is similar from chain to chain, the time that any island spends above sea level can vary widely, from a few million years in the case of the Galapagos to over...