EarthRef.org Digital Archive (ERDA) -- The history of seamounts that reach the sea surface

Description
Only a tiny proportion (a few percent) of seamounts attain heights that bring their summits above sealevel where a post-volcanic history more complicated than mere subsidence can develop. Nearly all of these island volcanoes erupt on lithosphere older than 5 m.y. and most develop on crust at least several tens of m.y. old. In this keynote presentation for the First SBN Workshop Jerry Winterer reviews the history of seamounts and how they come to forming reefs, crags, barriers, atolls and guyots. Repeated fluctuations of sealevel, particularly those of the magnitude a frequency of those in the Pleistocene, result in the formation of an atoll through rainwater dissolution, rather than the classical Darwin model of atoll formation. Few pre-Neogene atolls are known, possible because sealevel fluctuations were of insufficient amplitude (100 m) and duration (100 ky) to permit the necessary rainwater dissolution.

Project -- Meetings and Workshops -- SBN Workshops
The goal of the Seamount Biogeosciences Network (SBN) is to bring together all the diverse science disciplines involved in seamount research, to communicate about and discuss seamount science, and to explore innovative ways to network amongst the diverse communities working on seamounts.