Tarduno and an international team spent two months aboard the ocean drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, retrieving samples of rock from the Emperor-Hawaiian seamount chain miles beneath the sea's surface. Rocks retrieved in 1980 and 1992 hinted that the seamounts were not conforming to expectations. The team started at the northern end of the chain, near Japan, braving cold, foggy days and dodging the occasional typhoon to pull up several long cores of rock as they worked their way south. Using a highly sensitive magnetic device called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), Tarduno's team discovered that the magnetism of the cores did not fit with conventional wisdom of fixed hotspots.
And are the evos squirming? To be impressed with this, you have to not know how good the evidence is for the volcanic-hotspot-under-sliding-plate origins of the Hawaiian/Northwest Islands chain. There's nothing else out there.