Kodiak Seamount is the oldest

seamount A seamount is a large geologic landform that rises from the ocean floor that does not reach to the water's surface (sea level), and thus is not an island, islet or cliff-rock. Seamounts are typically formed from extinct volcanoes that rise abru ...

in the Kodiak-Bowie Seamount chain, with an estimated age of 24 million years. It lies at the northernmost end of the chain and its flat-topped summit is strewn with

fault line In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

s. Like the rest of the Kodiak-Bowie seamounts, it was formed by the

Bowie hotspot The Bowie hotspot is a volcanic hotspot, located west of Haida Gwaii in the Pacific Ocean. Almost all magma created by the hotspot has the composition of basalt, and so the volcanoes are constructed almost entirely of this igneous rock. The eru ...

. Kodiak Seamount will eventually be destroyed by

subduction Subduction is a geological process in which the oceanic lithosphere is recycled into the Earth's mantle at convergent boundaries. Where the oceanic lithosphere of a tectonic plate converges with the less dense lithosphere of a second plate, the ...

by the

Aleutian Trench The Aleutian Trench (or Aleutian Trough) is an oceanic trench along a convergent plate boundary which runs along the southern coastline of Alaska and the Aleutian islands. The trench extends for from a triple junction in the west with the Ulakh ...

once it is carried into the trench by the ongoing plate motion, although this will not fully occur for several million more years if the current rate of motion is maintained. Because of Kodiak Seamount's approach into the Aleutian Trench, it is literally cracking up under the stress.Alaska Demo: Day 3, July 31, 1999
Retrieved on 2007-09-16 Although Kodiak is the oldest extant seamount in the Kodiak-Bowie chain, the adjacent lower slope contains transverse scars indicating earlier subduction of seamounts.

References

{{Reflist Guyots Seamounts of the Pacific Ocean Hotspot volcanoes

See also

References