One of our main research objectives for drilling the Louisville seamount trail is to try to better understand what is happening in the mantle underneath it. Volcanoes and earthquakes are our most dramatic reminders that the inside of the Earth is not a static ball of rock: there is a fluid mantle that is causing the seemingly solid crust beneath us to move and change.
There are two websites that can allow students to see where the mantle is most visibly impacting the Earth’s crust today. The Smithsonian Institute’s Global Volcanism Project website (http://www.volcano.si.edu/) has a map showing where all the world’s potentially active volcanoes are located, and also has a page that tells which of the world’s volcanoes have erupted in the past week. The USGS’s Earthquake Hazards Program website (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/) has a map that shows where all of the earth’s earthquakes have occurred in the previous week, all the way up to the last hour. I learned from it today that just yesterday a 5.2 earthquake occurred in the Kermadec Trench very close to the place where, just a couple days ago, the JOIDES Resolution passed over it. Both websites have many other resources that can be useful to an educator. For example, the map that accompanies this blog is from the Global Volcanism Project’s website and shows where all of the world’s major hotspots are located. The current location of the hotspot that created the Louisville seamount trail is at #23.
Along with helping students to better understand that the earth is a dynamic system, having students compare both websites can also be a great introduction to plate tectonics. They can observe that earthquakes and volcanoes tend to happen in the same places and often form connect-the-dot lines. If they compare these with the same places on Google Earth (see my previous blog) and notice the ocean trenches that accompany volcano and earthquake activity, they will just have discovered the boundaries of some of the world’s continental and ocean plates.
