What causes a hot spot and what feeds it? I have heard they are caused by meteors but then why don't all meteors cause hot spots?

Would you be a bit more specific about what kind of hot spot you are referring to.

In Hawaii, the volcano's and the islands themselves are suppose to caused by a "hot spot". I have also heard that Yellowstone Park itself is a hotspot that once erupted in a monsterous volcano. The original hotspot that caused Yellowstone Park is suppose to have originated in Southern Oregon and then moved across southern Idaho and up to Yellowstone, erupting periodically along the way in monster volcanos.

These hot spots are not the result of meteorites but of magma working its way up through the Earth's crust to the surface. Sometimes the reason they emerge at a particular point has been pretty well identified, in other cases it has not. In cases where the hot spot seems to have moved over many years it is really the movement of a continental or tectonic plate over a stationary magma tube that produces a series of new hot spots on the Earth's surface.

As usual Minnesota is right.

To embellish his answer a little, here are some excerpts from Annals of the Former World by John McPhee, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book about geology. Highly recommended.

(Page 390, discussing Yellowstone): "[Geologists] believe that as North America slides over this fixed locus of thermal energy the rising heat is so intense that it penetrates the plate...The geologic term for such a place is 'hot spot.' The earth seems to have about sixty of them -- most older, and many less productive, than Yellowstone...Hawaii is the world's most preserved and trackable hot spot."

(Page 392): "Hot spots provide one more way of calculating plate velocities, for hot spots are to the drift of plates as stars to navigation."

(Page 397): "Heat rising from hot spots apparently lubricates the asthenosphere -- the layer on which the plates slide. According to theory, the plates would stop moving if the hot spots were not there...From very deep in the mantle (and perhaps all the way from the core) the heat is thought to rise in a concentrated column, and for this reason is alternatively called a plume."

(Pages 398-9): "Hot spots seem to be active for roughly a hundred million years...The perforations made by hot spots may be analogous to the perforations in sheets of postage stamps. Plume tracks might weaken the plates through which they pass, so that tens of millions of years later the plates would break apart along those lines."

Hope that helps.

Thank you so much for all your help on all my questions. I have some books on geology but I have to keep them fairly simple. I haven't had any formal education in this area but living here in the middle of all these "former" volcanos, I have developed a real interest in them and the land around Idaho.