The Darwin Rise is a broad triangular region in the north central Pacific Ocean where there is a concentration of atolls.
During his voyage across the globe Charles Darwin realised that vertical crustal motion must be responsible for the formation of continents and ocean basins, as well as isolated atolls in the Pacific.
In 1964 U.S. geologist Henry Menard subsequently named the uplifted area in the Pacific after the English naturalist.
The ages of these seamounts in general follow the motion of the Pacific Plate from 130 to 180 Ma, as predicted by conventional hotspot theory, and decrease from west to east and north to south.
[5][6] Instead this feature may have formed from diapirs or plumes rising from the Earth's upper mantle, which results in chains of sea mounts along the direction of the plate motion.