Hawaii’s scenic volcanoes come in two chemical flavors, and now scientists think the igneous peaks on several other Pacific island chains do, too.
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Two parallel lines of volcanoes stretch from the Big Island of Hawaii in the southeast to Molokai in the northwest. Volcanoes on the Samoan and Marquesas islands are similarly paired. A new study finds that, as in Hawaii, one row is richer than the other in versions of elements such as lead and neodymium.
“This might be a common feature for all the Pacific hotspots,” says Shichun Huang, a geochemist at Harvard University and lead author of a paper appearing online September 18 in Nature Geoscience.