East Australia hotspot

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The East Australia hotspot is marked 30 on map.

View inside the crater of Mount Schank from the rim

The East Australia hotspot is a volcanic hotspot that takes advantage of weak spots in the Indo-Australian Plate to feed magma to the volcanoes of Eastern Australia. It does not produce a single chain of volcanoes like the Hawaiian Islands. Tweed Volcano in New South Wales is a large shield volcano that was formed by the hotspot about 23 million years ago and has one of the biggest erosion calderas in the world. The most recent eruptions were about 5,000 years ago and formed the volcanoes Mount Schank, Mount Gambier and Mount Napier in the Newer Volcanics Province.

Unlike most hotspots, the East Australia hotspot has explosive eruptions, unlike the runny lava flows of the Hawaii hotspot, the Iceland hotspot and the Réunion hotspot. The hotspot is explosive because basaltic magma is trapped in the less dense continental crust, which is heated and melts to form rhyolites. These rhyolites can be quite hot and form violent eruptions, despite their low water content.