Let's Get Physical

In the middle of Un’Goro Crater lies Fire Plume Ridge, and as the map shows, it’s just a giant volcano (it’s actually not that big. Poor scaling on the cartographer’s end).

However, this means the area is rich in igneous rock; specifically extrusive igneous rock because it has cooled on the Earth’s surface. This has also led to the creation of obsidian or volcanic glass. Obsidian is a mafic, or dark colored, mineral. And just because I can’t mine obsidian with my mining pick does not mean that it’s not there, I KNOW it’s there, physical geography tells me so, you can’t fool me Blizzard.

See, not that big. Not much taller than that palm tree...which also is not that big.

The big question is how this volcano formed. A clue to answering this question lies in the mountainous borders of the crater. The mountains are high and ring the crater. In my professional opinion, it would seem that these mountains were formed by the convergence of one of more tectonic plates. In fact, it would seem that multiple plates collided around Un’Goro Crater to form the near perfect circular mountain border (the perfection of the cicrle is actually quite weird). The plates collided and the impacting crust was pushed upwards, forming the mountains. This is called convergence. 

These collisions, as you can imagine, would have caused alterations to the surrounding crust. The shock waves sent through could have caused the crust to rupture, allowing hot magma from the asthenosphere to push through the lithosphere onto the Earth’s surface, thus effectively starting the formation of a volcano. 

Oh those mountains. So tall. So green.

Still can't explain the dinosaurs.