Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Reunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, sits above one of Earth's mantle plumes. The effects are hard to miss.

One of the island's two massive volcanoes, the aptly named Piton de la Forneza, or peak of

the furnace, is one of the most hyperactive volcanoes on the planet. But the plume's modern-day

punch is nothing compared to its past.

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Okay. you listen. It helps people find this podcast. Around 65 million years ago, the mantle plume was under what is now India.

It caused a series of lava floods that smothered one and a half million square

kilometers of land over only 700,000 years,

a blip on the geological timeline. That's enough lava to bury Texas, California, and Montana.

In 2012, a team of geophysicists and seismologists set out to map the plume.

They deployed a giant network of seismometers across the vast depths of the Indian Ocean seafloor.

Nearly a decade later, the team has revealed that the mantle is stranger than expected.

The team reported in June in nature geoscience

that the plume isn't a simple column. Instead, a titanic mantle plume tree rises from the fringes

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