Mauna Loa Volcano

• The world's biggest active volcano, Mauna Loa, might explode at any moment.

Where is Mauna Loa?

• Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes that make up Hawaii's Big Island.
• It is the most southern of the Hawaiian islands.
• It is not the tallest (that honor belongs to Mauna Kea), but it is the largest and accounts for roughly half of the island's land mass.
• It is located directly north of the Kilauea volcano, which is currently erupting from its summit crater.
• Kilauea is best known for its 2018 eruption, which destroyed 700 homes and sent lava rivers across farms and into the ocean.
• Mauna Loa's last eruption occurred 38 years ago.

What about the rest of the volcanoes?

Recently Erupted:

• Sangay Volcano: Ecuador
• Taal Volcano: Philippines
• Mt. Sinabung, Merapi volcano, Semeru volcano (Indonesia)

Volcanoes in India:

• Barren Island, Andaman Islands (India's only active volcano)
• Narcondam, Andaman Islands
• Baratang, Andaman Islands
• Deccan Traps, Maharashtra
• Dhinodhar Hills, Gujarat
• Dhosi Hill, Haryana

What is the global distribution of volcanoes?

• Volcanoes are found all over the world, mostly along the edges of tectonic plates, though intra-plate volcanoes form from mantle Hotspots (e.g., Hawaii).
• Some volcanic regions, such as Iceland, are located near both a hotspot and a plate boundary.

Volcano World Distribution:

Belt of the Pacific or The Pacific "Ring of Fire":

• It is a chain of volcanoes and sites located around the Pacific Ocean's edges on most of the Earth's subduction zones with high seismic activity.
• There are 452 volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire.
• The majority of its active volcanoes are found on its western edge, from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula to the Japanese and Southeast Asian islands.

Mid-Continental Belt:

• This volcanic belt runs through Europe, North America, Asia Minor, Caucasia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to the Himalayan Mountain system, which includes Tibet, the Pamir, Tien-Shan, and the mountains of China, Myammar, and eastern Siberia.
• This belt includes the volcanoes of the Alps, the Mediterranean Sea (Stromboli, Vesuvius, Etna, and so on), the Aegean Sea, Mt. Ararat (Turkey), Elburz, the Hindukush, and the Himalayas.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge

• It divides the North and South American Plates from the Eurasian and African Plates.
• Like a long, thin undersea volcano, magma rises through the cracks and leaks out onto the ocean floor. When magma meets water, it cools and solidifies, adding to the edges of the plates moving sideways.
• This process along the divergent boundary has produced the world's longest topographic feature in the form of Mid oceanic ridges beneath the oceans.

Volcanoes within a plate:

• Intraplate, or "hot-spot," volcanoes are the 5% of known volcanoes in the world that are not closely related to plate margins.
• A hot spot is thought to be caused by the rise of a deep-mantle plume, which is caused by the very slow convection of highly viscous material in the Earth's mantle.
• It can be represented by a single oceanic volcano or by chains of volcanoes like the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chains.

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