Australia was once home to hundreds of ancient volcanoes. We might finally know why

Geologically speaking, Australia is a relatively quiet place to live. Earthquakes are rare and usually gentle, and as is the case with volcanoes, there has been no amount of belching from magma on the mainland for thousands of years.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, Earth is littered with the remnants of mysterious eruptions that shattered the crust with surprising regularity over the past 80 million years.

A new study suggests that some of the most unusual periods of activity were the result of an ancient sea floor winding its way down the plate, providing the perfect mixture for a long course of eruptions along the continent.

From the steep slopes of Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain to the iconic Victorian organ tubes, to the dramatic peaks of the Queensland Greenhouse Mountains, a dizzying array of stones are as dizzying as the crooked spines on Australia’s east coast.

Its cause was never clear.

Geologist Ben Mather of the University of Sydney says, “We are not in the famous” ring of fire “in the Pacific that produces a lot of volcanoes and earthquakes.”

Therefore, we needed another explanation for the existence of so many volcanoes on the east coast of Australia.

In many parts of the world, far from the edges of any tectonic plates, volcanoes are the product of soaring temperatures that scorch the crust. As crust slides through patches of high temperature, vulnerabilities can direct the rise of magma to the surface.

However, hot spot volcanoes tend to appear like ellipses in landscapes. Many Australian volcanoes are single plumes – standing alone in the middle of nowhere.

“Instead of massive eruptions like Krakatoa or Vesuvius, or famous volcanoes like Mt Fuji, the effect is much like bubbles created during the heating of the pie mixture,” says Mather.

An alternative mechanism may lie in pockets of explosive chemistry.

The mixture of volatiles can interact to form gases that are pushed upwards across weak parts of the continent, generating volcanoes like many of the ones we find in Australia.

It’s a solid hypothesis with good evidence to support it, but it leaves open the question of where these mixtures arose in the first place.

Perhaps swirls of molten rock washed away as one continent slid under another, or perhaps the currents in the mantle were loosened from the lower parts of the crust. These events may explain the many millions of years of volcanoes that blanketed a strip of Earth right at the knife’s edge from a sunken piece of crust.

To cover 100 million years of volcanic history, we will need a large scale model with survivability.

Moreover, it will also need to explain similar volcanoes spreading on the surface of its underwater neighbor, the “lost” continent of Zealandia.

This volcanic “backbone” is actually spread across a 5,000-kilometer (3,100 mi) wide strip of Earth’s crust.

None of the current theories hopes to explain all of this.

Fortunately, this extensive period of geological activity coincides precisely with the sinking of a large portion of the Pacific Plate away from eastern Australia, starting from the Tonga Carmadec Trench to the east and north of New Zealand.

Thousands of kilometers from the sea floor are slowly being pushed under the continental shelf of Australia, bringing with it the rich ice of volatile minerals created by marine life when dinosaurs stepped around.

“What defines Eastern Australia-Zealandia is that the sea floor that is pushed under the continent from the western Pacific Ocean is highly concentrated in water and carbon-rich rocks,” says Mather.

“This creates a transition zone directly under the east coast of Australia that is rich in volatiles.”

The theory not only explains periods of volcanic activity dating back millions of years, but also explains the extent of their spread deep into the interior of the continent.

Finding ample evidence to support the theory is not easy, given that we have yet to have adequate coverage of seismic sensors across Zealandia and eastern Australia. But researchers are confident that our data is in line with this new model.

The isotopes collected from volcanic rock formations down the coast also match the types of signatures expected from thick layers of viscosity on the ocean floor being cooked up in the mantle.

“The peaks of volcanic activity are closely related to the amount of recycled seabed in the Tonga Carradec Trench in eastern New Zealand,” says Mather.

It is not just the geological history of Australia that demands an explanation. The theory can be used to explain similar fields of activity around the world, including eastern China and the western United States.

It is not clear if Australia expects new explosive formations in the near future. With a belly full of volcano mixtures, it’s possible the days of geological activity aren’t over yet.

This research has been published in Science Advances.

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