Hot - spot volcanoes

About five percent of volcanoes are not near the margins of tectonic plates. They are over especially hot places in the Earth's interior called hot spots.

Hot spots are created by mantle plumes - hot currents that rise all the way from the core through the mantle. When mantle plume come up under the crust, they burn their way through to become hot-spot volcanoes.

Famous hot-spot volcanoes include the Hawaiian island volcanoes and Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

Hot-spot volcanoes ooze runny lava that spreads out to create shield volcanoes ( see kind of
volcano ). Lava from hot-spot volcanoes also creates plateaux, such as the Massif Central in France.

The geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pots of Yellowstone National Park, USA, indicate a hot spot below.

Yellowstone has had three huge eruptions in the past 2 million years. The first produced over 2000 times as much lava as the 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens.

Hot spots stay in the same place while tectonic plates slide over the top of them. Each time the plate moves, the hot spot creates a new volcano.

The movement of the Pacific plate over the Hawaiian hot spot created a chain of old volcanoes 6000 km long. It starts with the Meiji seamount under the sea north of Japan, and ends with the Hawaiian islands.