Abstract
The long-standing paradigm that hotspot volcanoes such as Hawaii or Iceland represent the surface expression of mantle plumes—hot, buoyant upwelling regions beneath the Earth’s lithosphere—has recently been the focus of controversy. Whether mantle plumes exist or not is pivotal for our understanding of the thermal, dynamic and compositional evolution of the Earth’s mantle. Here we show that uranium-series disequilibria measured in hotspot lavas indicate that hotspots are indeed associated with hot and buoyant upwellings and that weaker (low buoyancy flux) hotspots such as Iceland and the Azores are characterized by lower excess temperatures than stronger hotspots such as Hawaii. This direct link between buoyancy flux and mantle temperature is evidence for the existence of mantle plumes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank D. McKenzie for the support of A.S. during his visit to IPGP. A.E.S.’s visit to Paris was supported by IPGP funds. We also thank D. McKenzie, A. Davaille, M. Moreira and C. Farnetani for numerous discussions about plumes. We are grateful to P. Olson and T. Kokfelt for comments.
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Supplementary Notes
This file contains Supplementary Figure 1 and Supplementary Table 1. Supplementary Figure 1 shows the excess temperature in plumes at the base of the lithosphere as a function of the buoyancy flux. Supplementary Table 1 describes the parameters used in the modelling and their typical values. This file also contains a description of the model. (PDF 115 kb)
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Bourdon, B., Ribe, N., Stracke, A. et al. Insights into the dynamics of mantle plumes from uranium-series geochemistry. Nature 444, 713–717 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05341
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05341
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