The anatomy of mantle plumes, and melting processes within them, remain enigmatic and controversial issues despite numerous attempts to investigate them. The main obstacle to understanding plumes has been our past two-dimensional approach in exmining them. The discovery of giant landslides on the flanks of Mauna Loa provides an opportunity to sample the products of plume processes in the third dimension. This study will extend our knowledge the magmatic history Mauna Loa's, the world's largest volcano, by -200,000 years, should provide fundamental insights into the development of hotspot-generated volcanoes and clarify longstanding controversies concerning the structure and dynamics of the Hawaiian plume. We will also examine the following hypotheses: Hawaiian volcanoes were derived from some of the hottest magmas erupted in the 100 million years and oceanic island volcanoes are dominantly comprised of fragmental lava rather than pillow lava (which has implications for the geologic hazards on all oceanic islands).
