To the south of the aforementioned area, there are other extinct submerged volcanoes that some scientists call “ las abuelas” or the grandmothers of the Canary Islands. “We believe that these are the embryos of the new Canary Islands,” explains Luis Somoza, a marine geologist with the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) and a member of the 2017 expedition. It makes perfect sense that they are to the west as it matches the movement of the Earth’s crust over the hotspot. They lie at a depth of about 5,000 meters. In 2017, a research vessel located an area 400 kilometers west of the island of El Hierro where they discovered new submarine volcanoes that have recently been active or may even be active now. The map above shows where new Canary Islands may currently be in the process of being born. New islands will certainly emerge, always to the west, but we will not see any of them, because it will happen in millions of years.” In the same way, the oldest islands, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, are gradually disappearing through a process of erosion and will end up under the sea. This is the process that has created all the Canary Islands and is still going on. “It’s the same as when you push a ball to the bottom of a pool and it shoots to the surface. “In the hotspot, the magma is about 200º C higher, which makes it more buoyant,” explains Carracedo. However, the hotspot theory is controversial because it does not fully explain all the activity in the Canary Islands for example, the eruptions on old islands such as Lanzarote in relatively recent times. This is the same type of volcanic activity that created the Hawaiian archipelago in the US. These cracks allow the magma to push through the crust to form volcanoes. Volcanologists think that under the Canary Islands there is a “hotspot,” a reservoir of extremely hot magma that continually seeks a way to emerge, producing earthquakes and buckling the surface of the islands until they crack. Another question is whether it gushes out instantaneously or if it’s a gradual process that takes millions of years. One of the main questions about the La Palma eruption is where exactly the magma emerging from the mouth of the volcano comes from. Updated with data from the eruption as at Octo(Copernicus) Many of them reached the sea and created platforms that enlarged the surface of the island. This is probably the only place in Spain where in just a few hours you can touch stones that originated in the last five centuries it is the country’s youngest terrain.Īs is the case now, the lava tongues of most of the previous eruptions advanced along the western slopes of Cumbre Vieja. In the last five centuries, all La Palma’s volcanoes have emerged in Cumbre Vieja, a spectacular mountain range featuring almost 30 craters that extends to the south of the island. It is both a destructive and creative phenomenon, for without volcanoes none of the Canary Islands would exist. It is the latest chapter in a history of volcanic activity that began more than 20 million years ago. The rivers of lava have destroyed or damaged more than a thousand buildings, far more than recorded in other eruptions. The graphic above shows the eruption of the Cabeza de Vaca volcano on La Palma from September 21 to October 1.
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