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Fixed hotspots gone with the wind

Nature volume 391, pages 739–740 (1998)Cite this article

Island chains such as Hawaii are produced by hotspots — points of volcanic activity driven by plumes of hot rock. New analyses reveal that hotspots are much more mobile than had been thought.

Ever since we have known that the Earth's tectonic plates are in relative motion, the search has been on for fixed points to which absolute plate motion can be referred. For a while it was assumed that hotspots, long-lived centres of volcanic activity, provide such a reference frame. Hotspots are commonly explained by mantle plumes, narrow conduits of upwelling hot rock that probably originate near the core-mantle boundary and rise close to the surface. But it seems unlikely that plumes can be firmly anchored in a convecting mantle. Writing in Geophysical Journal International1, Steinberger and O'Connell now describe how they have used kinematic models to tackle the issue — they show how plumes have swayed, drifted and twisted in the large-scale mantle flow, yet have produced the observed hotspot tracks at the Earth's surface.

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Figure 1: Topography of the northern Pacific seafloor, showing the chain of islands and seamounts originating at Hawaii, and the Emperor seamount chain.

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  1. Ulrich Christensen is at the Institut für Geophysik, Herzberger Landstrasse 180, Göttingen, 37075, Germany

    Ulrich Christensen

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  1. Ulrich Christensen
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Christensen, U. Fixed hotspots gone with the wind. Nature 391, 739–740 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/35736

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