Arago hotspot (also known as the Rurutu hotspot, Young Rurutu hotspot or Atiu hotspot) is a hotspot in the Pacific Ocean, presently located below the Arago seamount close to the island of Rurutu, French Polynesia.
Arago is part of a family of hotspots in the southern Pacific, which include the Society hotspot and the Macdonald hotspot among others. These are structures beneath Earth's crust which generate volcanoes and which are in part formed by mantle plumes, although Arago itself might have a shallower origin. As the Pacific plate moves over the hotspots, new volcanoes form and old volcanoes are carried away; sometimes an older volcano is carried over the hotspot and is then uplifted as happened with Rurutu.
The Arago hotspot is responsible for the formation of Arago seamount and uplift on Rurutu; however reconstructions of the past positions of tectonic plates and geochemistry suggest that other islands and seamounts were constructed by the Arago hotspot during the past 120 million years. These potentially include the Wake Seamounts, the Ratak Chain of the Marshall Islands, numerous seamounts northwest of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Gilbert Islands as well as part of the Austral Islands and Cook Islands.
- ^ Finlayson et al. 2018, p. 170.