Largest oceanic lava plateau

There have been periods in the Earth's history when volcanic magma has been produced in huge volumes that spread out over significant areas of the Earth. We have never witnessed one of these events in human history, but evidence for them can be found in huge oceanic lava plateaus today. The Ontong Java Plateau (OJP) is such a plateau, located in the south-west Pacific Ocean. The OJP was produced around 120 million years ago and further built up by a smaller volcanic event around 90 million years ago. We can see that two other south-west Pacific plateaus, the Manihiki and the Hikurangi – which are now separated from the OJP by later-formed ocean basins – are of similar age and composition and are deemed to have been formed as a single plateau of lava called the Ontong Java-Manihiki-Hikurangi plateau. This covered 1% of Earth's surface and represented a volume of 80,000,000 km³ (19,000,000 cubic miles) of basaltic magma. This volcanic event represents the largest of the past 200 million years, with magma-production rates estimated at 22 km³ (5.3 cubic miles) per year over a period of three million years.