At about 11.50 pm local time on Saturday 2 March 2024, a circumferential fissure on the upper southeastern flank of Mount La Cumbre, an active shield volcano on Fernandina Island in the Galápagos Islands. The fissure propagated for between three and five kilometres, and produced gaseous emissions with a low ash content which rose to between two and three kilometres above the summit of the volcano. These emissions continued to about 4.00 am before subsiding, with lava also issuing from the fissure between about 0.45 and 1.35 am. Based upon satellite observations of the eruption, about 46 460 tons of sulphur dioxide were released from the fissure on 3 March, with a further 24 000 of sulphur dioxide being released on 4 March, and about 2228 tons on 5 March. Lava continued to flow down the flanks of the mountain over this time, reaching 7.9 km from the fissure by Wednesday 6 March.
The volcanos of the Galapagos are fuelled by a mantle plume, the Galapagos Hotspot, an upwelling of hot magma from deep within the Earth’s mantle which pierces the overlying Nazca Plate, and moves independently of it. This plume transverses the plate at a rate of 0.46 degrees per million years, which has led to the formation of the string of volcanoes which form the Galapagos Islands. However, analysis of the geochemical composition of the lavas of Wolf Volcano, one of the Galapagos volcanoes, has shown that these are distinct from the lavas of the neighbouring Ecuador and Darwin volcanoes, but show strong similarities to lavas produced on the Galapagos Spreading Centre over 200 km to the north, a trait shared with lavas from other Galapagos volcanoes, most notably Santa Cruz and Genovesa, suggesting that there is some interplay between these two sources.
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