Eastern Australia has hundreds of enigmatic volcanoes. New research shows how they formed – Phys.org

The landscape of eastern Australia is dotted with hundreds of extinct volcanoes. They gave rise to an environment to which Aboriginal people have been connected for tens of thousands of years, and the rich soils upon which modern Australia has grown in the last few hundred years.
Yet until recently, these volcanoes posed a geological mystery. There are two common ways volcanoes form: at the edges of tectonic plates, or on top of blobs of hot material called “mantle plumes,” which rise from the planet’s…

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