Volcano Discovered Beneath The Pacific Ocean: World’s Biggest Volcano

A scientist who discovered the world’s biggest volcano — an underwater plateau in the Pacific Ocean about the size of New Mexico — has named it after Texas A&M, the university where he taught for nearly three decades.

William Sager, an oceanographer who spent 29 years working at Texas A&M in the College of Geosciences, was part of a team that examined a large underwater area in the northwest Pacific known as the Shatsky Rise, located about 1,000 miles southeast of Japan.

Sager, who is now with the University of Houston, found that the plateau contained three enormous mounds and named the largest one Tamu Massif — Tamu as the abbreviation for Texas A&M, while massif comes from French for “massive” and is a scientific term for a large mountain mass.