There are some large shield volcanoes in the world’s oceans where the lava is usually not ejected from the crater in violent explosions, but flows slowly out of the ground from long fissures. In the recent eruption of the Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos Islands, which lie just under a thousand kilometers off South America in the Pacific Ocean, one of these fissures was fed through a curved pathway in June 2018. This 15 kilometer-long pathway, including the kink, was created by the interaction of three different forces in the subsurface, Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, together with Marco Bagnardi and Paul Lundgren from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, now explain based on computer models in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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Source: Phys.org