Final answer:
The Hawaiian Islands are formed by a hotspot, which is a mantle plume that creates volcanic activity and builds islands over time as the plate moves over it. Unlike divergent or convergent plate boundaries, a hotspot can occur far from the edges of tectonic plates.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Hawaiian Islands are an example of hotspots. A hotspot is an area far from plate boundaries where heat is rising from the interior of Earth. The Hawaiian hotspot has been active for at least 100 million years, creating a chain of volcanic islands over time as the Earth's plates have moved. As the Pacific Plate moved over the stationary hotspot, the magma from the mantle breached the ocean's crust, forming the islands. Unlike the volcanic activity associated with plate boundaries such as divergent and convergent borders, hotspots provide the heat to maintain active volcanoes on the islands, like those in Hawaii. The largest of these volcanoes are Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and despite Mauna Kea being dormant, both contribute significantly to the mountainous topography of the islands.
The creation of the Hawaiian island chain is a clear indicator of the presence of a hotspot under the Pacific Ocean's crust. This geological activity is marked by volcanic eruptions that give rise to islands. Over millions of years, the hotspot has thus been responsible for the formation of the Hawaiian Islands without the direct influence of plate tectonic boundaries such as ocean-ocean transform, continent-ocean transform, or divergent boundaries.