Secret Volcano Discovered Beneath New Zealand, Will It Be A Threat?

First Posted: Jun 07, 2016 07:00 AM EDT
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New Zealand has dealt with volcanic activity but a recent discovery tied up to a possible volcano forming beneath Matata comes as a surprise to scientists who discovered a massive magma build-up.

The small coast town is just 125 miles from Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island though the issue here is the formation of the magma chamber which was nowhere near an active volcano. Satellite data was used to study the minor shifts in the crust and eventually pointed to a massive subsurface magma chamber.

The discovery was published on Science Advances by geophysicist Ian Hamling who described the discovery as “quite a big surprise”.

Hamling and his team have been studying the Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ) which runs all the way down the center of New Zealand’s North Island, a region where 25 large scale volcanic eruptions have occurred in the past 1.6 million years.

The place is currently home to bubbling hot pots and frequent eruptions at Whakaari – a small active volcano situated 30 miles from the East Coast of the North Island.

While ground motions along TVZ seemed to be subsiding, it was the fact that the ground beneath Matata had been rising since 1950 with the rate of increase substantially growing since the mid-2000s.

Matata is a town with 650 inhabitants and has been witness to thousands of small earthquakes that were previously believed to be caused by tectonic shifts.

A look at the number show that about 9 million cubic meters of magma (equivalent to about 3,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools) have pressed into the Earth's crust annually particularly during the chamber's peak growth period.

Despite the numbers, Hamling believes that the developing magma chamber may not develop into a volcano, mainly because it is located 6 miles below the Earth’s surface.

"When you compare it to other places, like Yellowstone, we're smaller than that. But it's still pretty significant." Hamling said.

The discovery over in New Zealand is however not the first time where magma was found pressing into the Earth’s crust.

Per Matthew Pritchard, a geophysicist from Cornell University, all these are no different from something he calls "zombie volcanoes". He discovered similar examples in the central Andes mountain range – showing signs of life despite the fact that they should be ‘dead’.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

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