This seamount chain, lying approximately 500 km (310 mi) offshore from the island of Newfoundland, consists of several submarine volcanoes that have been extinct for millions of years.

The Fogo Seamounts are of Early Cretaceous age and form a broad zone of basaltic volcanoes off the continental shelf of Atlantic Canada.

To the north and east, the Fogo Seamounts are partially buried under sediment due to their close proximity to the continental slope.

Another theory is that the Fogo Seamounts represented mantle upwelling that could have been initiated by a slab-tear from Tethyan subduction beneath the Iberian Peninsula.

After leaving Southampton on 10 April 1912, Titanic called at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, before heading west to New York.

The collision caused the hull plates to buckle inwards along her starboard (right) side and opened five of her sixteen watertight compartments to the sea; she could only survive four flooding.

In 1986, a buried guyot on the continental slope at the northwesternmost end of the Fogo Seamount Chain was intersected by an exploratory well dubbed Narwhal F-99.

The well penetrated a thick sequence of Cenozoic and Cretaceous sediments before coming into contact with seamount basalt 4,478 m (14,692 ft) below sea level.