Louisville Ridge

Louisville Ridge
Louisville Ridge
	The Louisville Ridge stretches diagonally across this bathymetric map of the southwest Pacific Ocean.
Summit area	length:4,300 km (2,700 mi)
Location
Location	Southwest Pacific Ocean
Geology
Type	Seamount chain
Volcanic arc/chain	Hotspot volcanoes
History
Discovery date	1972

The Louisville Ridge, also known as the Louisville Seamount Chain,^[1] is an underwater chain of over 70 seamounts in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. As one of the longest seamount chains on Earth it stretches some 4,300 kilometres^[2] from the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge northwest to the Tonga-Kermadec Trench, where it subducts under the Indo-Australian Plate as part of the Pacific Plate. The movement of the Pacific Plate over the Louisville hotspot formed the chain.

Depth-sounding data first revealed the existence of the seamount chain in 1972.^[3]

Seamounts

The Louisville Ridge includes the following:

↑ "Marine Gazetteer Placedetails". Retrieved 2017-02-20.
↑ Vanderkluysen, L.; Mahoney, J. J.; Koppers, A. A.; and Lonsdale, P. F. (2007). Geochemical Evolution of the Louisville Seamount Chain, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #V42B-06.
↑ Sandwell, David T.; Walter H.F. Smith (1997). "Exploring the ocean basins with satellite altimeter data". Satellite Geodesy. La Jolla: Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Retrieved 2010-01-19. The Louisville Ridge was first detected in 1972 using depth soundings collected along random ship crossings of the South Pacific. Six years later the full extent of this chain was revealed by a radar altimeter aboard the Seasat (NASA) spacecraft.

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