Mauna Kea is a dormant volcano in the Hawaiian Islands, one of five volcanoes which together form the island of Hawaii. Pu'u Wekiu, one of numerous cinder cones on the summit plateau, is the highest point in the state of Hawaii at 13,796 feet . Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world when measured from base to summit, since its base is located on the seafloor about 19,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, bringing its total height to about 33,000 ft . In the Hawaiian language, mauna kea means "white mountain", a reference to its summit being regularly snow-capped during the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Geology
The five volcanoes that form Big Island
The Island of Hawai?i is built from five separate shield volcanoes that erupted somewhat sequentially, one overlapping the other. These are :
Kohala
Mauna Kea
Hual?lai
Mauna Loa
K?lauea
Mauna Kea is in the post-shield stage of volcanic evolution, having made the transition from the shield stage before about 200,000 to 250,000 years ago. At that time, its appearance was probably quite similar to that of its neighbor Mauna Loa today, a smooth shield volcano with a large summit caldera. Following the transition, eruptions became more explosive in character, resulting in the formation of numerous overlapping cinder cones which eventually filled and completely obscured the caldera. These cinder cones now form the peaks at the summit of Mauna Kea, with several of them exceeding 13,500 ft in elevation. After several hundred thousand years of slowly building itself up by volcanic activity, the mountain's height is slowly decreasing now as its massive weight depresses the Pacific seafloor beneath it.
The summit of Mauna Kea was entirely covered by a massive ice cap during the Pleistocene ice ages. The summit shows evidence of four periods of glaciation over the last 200,000 years, the last ending about 11,000 years ago, when the most recent ice age finished
