Bollons Seamount

Bollons Seamount is a seamount (underwater volcano) just east of the international date line, a few hundred miles off the coast of New Zealand.^{[1] [2]}

The seamount was involved in a 2002 survey and collection project defined to find the end scope of the Australian Plate.^[3] The Bollons Seamount has been shown to be a site of extensive Cretaceous-era rifting in the area towards the southern Chatham Rise between 83.7 and 78.5 MYA. Magnetic anomalies from the seamount indicate that it was the site of highly irregular activity, with differences in the rifting there being up to 100 km (62 mi). A 50 km (31 mi) gap near the seamount, known as the Ballons gap, is interpreted as being due to excess volcanism is the seafloor-spreading process. A ridge just south of the seamount, the Antipodes Fracture Zone, is interpreted as having been built by a combination of compression and volcanic activity associated with the triple-junction Bellingshausen-Marie plate boundary nearby.^[4]

References

1. "Bollons Seamount". Seamount database. Earthref, a National Science Foundation project.
2. "Google Maps". Google. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
3. "Hydrographic Report Number crunching time for Continental Shelf Project". 2002. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
4. Davy, B. (2006), Bollons Seamount and early New Zealand–Antarctic seafloor spreading, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 7, Q06021, doi:10.1029/2005GC001191.