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From reporter Robin George Andrews:

When the sinuous structures first came into view on the computer screen, John Wilding’s jaw dropped. “I was jumping around the office,” said the graduate student of geophysics from the California Institute of Technology. “I was thinking that it’s a part of the Earth that, in this moment, I was the only person on the planet who knew these things were there.”

Scientists had suspected that somewhere below Hawaii, a secret was entombed in stone — something that plays a leading role in influencing the island chain’s famous volcanism. Now, with the help of almost 200,000 earthquakes and a machine learning program, Wilding and his colleagues have finally unearthed it.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, the team has revealed a previously hidden collection of magma caches that may act like the beating heart of the volcanoes above. The discovery offers a possible solution to a long-standing mystery — how does magma from the deep mantle travel to the Hawaiian surface? The work gives scientists a valuable new window into the behavior of some of the most capricious, and hazardous, volcanoes on Earth.

The shallow magma reservoirs that feed Hawaii’s eruptions have been known about for some time. This is partly thanks to seismic waves, which are closely monitored in Hawaii by an ever-expanding network of sensors. The waves act like an ultrasound for Earth; changes in their speed and trajectory during their subterranean voyages tell scientists what sorts of matter they have been traveling through, providing clues to its temperature, density and composition.

But to truly understand what drives these volcanic powerhouses, scientists need to know what is happening at the interface of the squishy mantle and the solid crust. That is what the new study at last reveals in unexpected detail.

Read the full story here, free with email registration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/12/22/hawaii-volcanoes-magma-chambers/?utm_source=reddit.com