Summary: The Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain spans almost four thousand miles from the Hawaiian Islands to the Detroit Seamount in the north Pacific, an L- shaped chain that goes west then abruptly north. The 60-degree bend in the line of mostly undersea mountains and volcanic islands has puzzled scientists since it was first identified in the 1940s from the data of numerous echo sounding ships. A team of scientists have now used supercomputers to model and reconstruct the dynamics of Pacific tectonic plate motion that might explain the mysterious mountain chain bend, ion work published January 2022 in Nature Geoscience. They used the Stampede2 and Frontera supercomputers here at TACC, allocated by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. TACC science writer and podcast host Jorge Salazar discusses the geological mystery with study co-author Michael Gurnis, a professor of Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. Story Link: www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/hawaiian-empe…-supercomputers Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/
