Lord Howe Island sits about 600 kilometers off the New South Wales coast, a crescent of rainforest and sea cliffs that draws visitors for its spectacular beaches and its unique birdlife. Few realize they are standing on the weathered remains of a volcano.
And that volcano has family.
Lord Howe is part of a chain of islands, called “seamounts.” It is the only island above sea level — the rest are submerged in the Tasman Sea. Roughly 650 kilometers west runs a second chain, the Tasmantid seamounts, tracing almost the same path.
Two nearly identical chains side by side in the middle of a tectonic plate is unusual. For the first time, in a new paper published in the journal Gondwana Research, we can answer how this happened.
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