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.

"We got tired of referring to them as the one on the left, the one on the right and the big one,” Sager said in a Texas A&M news release.

RIVALS MARTIAN VOLCANOES

Sager started studying Tamu Massif about 20 years ago. Until now, researchers weren't sure whether Tamu Massif was a single volcano or a composite of many eruption points. Scientists examined core samples and data collected on board a research ship to confirm that the mass of basalt is one big volcano, believed to be about 145 million years old.

FULL STORY: http://news.msn.com/science-technology/worlds-biggest-volcano-found...