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Isotopic portrayal of the Earth’s upper mantle flow field

Nature volume 447, pages 1069–1074 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

It is now well established that oceanic plates sink into the lower mantle at subduction zones, but the reverse process of replacing lost upper-mantle material is not well constrained. Even whether the return flow is strongly localized as narrow upwellings or more broadly distributed remains uncertain. Here we show that the distribution of long-lived radiogenic isotopes along the world’s mid-ocean ridges can be used to map geochemical domains, which reflect contrasting refilling modes of the upper mantle. New hafnium isotopic data along the Southwest Indian Ridge delineate a sharp transition between an Indian province with a strong lower-mantle isotopic flavour and a South Atlantic province contaminated by advection of upper-mantle material beneath the lithospheric roots of the Archaean African craton. The upper mantle of both domains appears to be refilled through the seismically defined anomaly underlying South Africa and the Afar plume. Because of the viscous drag exerted by the continental keels, refilling of the upper mantle in the Atlantic and Indian domains appears to be slow and confined to localized upwellings. By contrast, in the unencumbered Pacific domain, upwellings seem comparatively much wider and more rapid.

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Figure 1: Isotopic characteristics of SWIR lavas compared to those of other MORB from the Indian, Pacific, South Atlantic and North Atlantic oceans.
Figure 2: Variations of 176 Hf/ 177 Hf, 143 Nd/ 144 Nd, 87 Sr/ 86 Sr, R C and 206 Pb/ 204 Pb along the ridge axis from the North Atlantic to Juan de Fuca.
Figure 3: Spectra of the isotopic signals.
Figure 4: Map view of the plate- and density-driven flow field at the base of the asthenosphere adapted from figure 7 of ref. 14 with permission.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Telouk for assistance with the Nu Plasma HR, and B. Reynard, I. Daniel, P. Oger and F. Chambat for suggestions. We also thank M. Behn for providing the map used to draw Fig. 4, J. Ritsema for sharing unpublished seismic profiles, and L. Dosso and B. Hanan for allowing us to view their unpublished data from the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. Financial support of the analytical work and publication costs were provided by CNRS-INSU (the programmes DyETI and SEDIT), while IPEV provided access to the Marion Dufresne II for sampling during the EDUL (summer 1997) and SWIFT (winter 2001) cruises.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre, CNRS UMR 5570, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, 46 Allée d'Italie, 69364 Lyon cedex 07, France,

    Christine M. Meyzen, Janne Blichert-Toft & Francis Albarède

  2. British Geological Survey, Keyworth, NG12 5GG, Nottingham, UK,

    John N. Ludden

  3. Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique, CNRS UMR 6112, Université de Nantes, 2 rue de la Houssinière, B.P. 92208, 44322 Nantes cedex 03, France,

    Eric Humler

  4. Laboratoire de Géosciences Marines, CNRS UMR 7154, Institut de Physique du Globe, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris cedex 05, France,

    Catherine Mével

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  1. Christine M. Meyzen
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Correspondence to Christine M. Meyzen.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information 1

This file contains Supplementary Figures 1-4, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Equation and additional references. (PDF 6517 kb)

Supplementary Information 2

This file contains Supplementary Data with the global MORB Sr, Nd, Hf, and Pb isotope data compilation and the calculation formula used in this work, as well as the data sources. (XLS 1420 kb)

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Meyzen, C., Blichert-Toft, J., Ludden, J. et al. Isotopic portrayal of the Earth’s upper mantle flow field. Nature 447, 1069–1074 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05920

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