Hawaiian hot spot study uncovers evidence of true polar wander

What happened

The planet spins, the tectonic plates shift and the spin axis wobbles, as do the magnetic poles, which makes determining how things move a rather tricky proposition. For Rice University's Richard Gordon, this problem came up when he was trying to understand the history of the Hawaiian hot spot, the deep-mantle source of the volcanism that created the Hawaiian–Emperor chain of islands and underwater volcanoes.