A guyot (or seamount) is a submerged, extinct volcano. There are chains of such volcanoes streching across the Pacific Ocean in particular that are very important in our interpretation of past plate movements and hot spot theory.
I chose this as "Word of the Week" because the biggest volcano on Earth has recently beeen discovered in the Pacific Ocean. The scale of this is staggering (it is over 15 times the area of Wales) and has been compared to the biggest volcano we kow of - Olympus Mons on Mars. What is really surprising is that we have only just discovered something so big - it does give the exciting prospect of what else is there to discover about our planet....
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