Mystery of the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend, solved?

The Hawaiian Island chain, as most people know it, runs from Hawai'i to Kaua'i and Ni'ihau, but the islands are only the tail of a string of volcanoes that runs all the way to the Aleutians.
What baffles science is why this long string makes a distinct turn midway.Chain extends 3,700 miles northwest from the main Hawaiian Islands, and then makes a right turn beyond Midway and Kure, continuing as a line of seamounts that eventually disappears at the northern edge of the Pacific tectonic plate.

The blue line follows the course of the chain and the red arrow marks the right turn. Credit: Modified from Google Earth.)Current geological thinking is that the massive Pacific plate, which forms part of the Earth's crust, is constantly moving, its edges sliding along or under or over other plates, or being shoved away from others by volcanic activity. And a feature called the Hawaiian hot spot punches volcanoes up through the plate.

Like a pencil marking a line of dots on a page, the hot spot under the moving plate leaves a line of volcanoes.But what could have caused the bend in the line? Some movement of the hot spot? A dramatic change in the direction in which the plate moves? The question was tackled in a recent paper in Science Magazine by geologists David Clague, former director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory now working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

and Warren Sharp, of the Berkeley Geochronology Center.They conclude that the bend in the 129-volcano Hawaiian-Emperor Chain (the name for the combination of the Hawaiian Archipelago south of the bend and the Emperor Seamounts north of it), occurred about 50 million years ago.They carefully determined the ages at which rocks in the chain were created, using the latest dating techniques available.