Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

This seems pretty obvious, but good job Science!

Anyone got a link that isn't behind a paywall?

Put the reader view on when the article comes up. You can read it

[removed]

The WaPo article doesn't include any images of these subterranean magma chambers, so I dug around and found what I think is the paper by Dr. Wilding and team: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade5755

TBH, I kind of understand why they didn't include diagrams. They're hard to understand, and are more exciting to experts than to... uh... me.

Thank you so much for sharing this story! Here's a little preview of the article for you.

From reporter Robin George Andrews:

When the sinuous structures first came into view on the computer screen, John Wilding’s jaw dropped. “I was jumping around the office,” said the graduate student of geophysics from the California Institute of Technology. “I was thinking that it’s a part of the Earth that, in this moment, I was the only person on the planet who knew these things were there.”

Scientists had suspected that somewhere below Hawaii, a secret was entombed in stone — something that plays a leading role in influencing the island chain’s famous volcanism. Now, with the help of almost 200,000 earthquakes and a machine learning program, Wilding and his colleagues have finally unearthed it.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, the team has revealed a previously hidden collection of magma caches that may act like the beating heart of the volcanoes above. The discovery offers a possible solution to a long-standing mystery — how does magma from the deep mantle travel to the Hawaiian surface? The work gives scientists a valuable new window into the behavior of some of the most capricious, and hazardous, volcanoes on Earth.

The shallow magma reservoirs that feed Hawaii’s eruptions have been known about for some time. This is partly thanks to seismic waves, which are closely monitored in Hawaii by an ever-expanding network of sensors. The waves act like an ultrasound for Earth; changes in their speed and trajectory during their subterranean voyages tell scientists what sorts of matter they have been traveling through, providing clues to its temperature, density and composition.

But to truly understand what drives these volcanic powerhouses, scientists need to know what is happening at the interface of the squishy mantle and the solid crust. That is what the new study at last reveals in unexpected detail.

Read the full story here, free with email registration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/12/22/hawaii-volcanoes-magma-chambers/?utm_source=reddit.com

Before, everyone thought the magma got there by horseback, but now the mystery is solved.

I mean, how else is the magma going to travel there?

[removed]

Saying it gets to the surface doesn't explain how it gets to the surface, and if I asked you to draw the plumbing system for its pathway to the surface I'd be willing to bet that you'd be pretty far from the truth. This study helps resolve that plumbing system which was pretty uncertain previously.

[removed]

Wow. The original article has some pretty compelling earthquake clusterings. I don't think we've managed to image upper mantle magma plumbing in quite as much detail as they have.

The title of post is pandering and misleading. It implies that for years that there was a giant mystery of how the magma appeared or got to the volcanoes/surface.

Not that they discovered the details and the layout of how they knew the magma got to the volcanoes (aka the only way it could have gotten to the surface).

Tap that geothermal power!

I got paywalled but I thought this image was helpful in my rather limited understanding of the discovery.

https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.ade5755/asset/f414e254-818a-4605-99b0-2972d8fefb47/assets/images/large/science.ade5755-f6.jpg

[removed]

[removed]

I feel like school went over this already, unless it was just a theory back then.

Just wait how mind blowing it will be when they find the smegma chambers.

An answer, maybe, but not a 'solution'.

Fig. 6. Cartoon summarizing observations. Eruptions and intrusions at Kīlauea cause pressure gradients to rapidly propagate through the Kīlauea transport structure to the Pāhala sill complex. Magma is injected into the Pāhala sill complex from the underlying magma- bearing volume; the sills are proximal to the plagioclase-spinel phase boundary, possibly in a polyphase coexistence region. The sills are connected to Kīlauea and the decollement/Ka‘ōiki region within the Mauna Loa edifice along continuous bands of seismicity.

> The title of post is pandering and misleading.

It's not. Not even a little bit.

>Not that they discovered the details and the layout of how they knew the magma got to the volcanoes (aka the only way it could have gotten to the surface).

Everybody with more than 2 brain cells already understood it came from underground. If you did not, you are the exception.

[removed]

We used to have a general idea of how and why magma plumes will erupt from the sea floor in certain areas creating Hotspots such as Hawaii. But we never had much more than theories and little evidence based off the study of physics of magma flow in lab models, which is insufficient to make any definite claim. The short answer is always, a combination of temperatures, pressures, and densities, but the exact mechanisms are sometimes poorly understood in complex geologic processes.

What I find interesting is the fault(s) depicted in the mantle. At those depths, beyond the brittle-ductile transition I would have expected the rocks to deform plastically as opposed to brittle deformation. Is it mylonitic? Can mylonites have seismicity?

Edit:

As previously assumed, brittle deformation doesn't occur in the lithospheric mantle so I think it's assumed that seismic anisotropic reflectors (generated from crystallographic preferred orientations) in the lithospheric mantle arise from grain size reduction via dislocation and diffusion creep along grain boundaries. These seismic anisotropic reflectors are thus interpreted as fine grained mylonitic shear zones and thus downward extensions of brittle faults across the brittle-ductile transition from the crust into the mantle.

Now I'm curious as to how these mantle shear zones, a ductile feature in a ductile regime, remain long lived enough to act as pathways for magma ascent...

[removed]