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Earth science

All rise for the case of the missing magma

Nature volume 494, pages 182–183 (2013)Cite this article

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A detailed geological analysis of a ridge in the Indian Ocean suggests that compositional variations in Earth's mantle have a surprisingly crucial role in the uplift of a bathymetric bulge along the ridge. See Article p.195

If you fix your gaze on a map of the Atlantic at a point midway between France and Newfoundland, you will see that water over the ridge is deep (3 kilometres or more). If you follow the ridge about 1,000 km northwards, you will see the plate boundary gradually shoaling until it reaches Iceland, where it rises above the waves. Such variation in ridge depth, with top-to-bottom amplitudes of several kilometres over stretches of thousands of kilometres, is not restricted to the Atlantic. Notable examples are also found near the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean and on the ridge between Madagascar and Antarctica in the Indian Ocean. This latter ridge, named the Marion Rise after the French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, is the focus of the study by Zhou and Dick6.

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Figure 1: Bathymetry of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion6 were published online on 6 February.

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  1. John Maclennan is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK.

    John Maclennan

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  1. John Maclennan
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Correspondence to John Maclennan.

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Maclennan, J. All rise for the case of the missing magma. Nature 494, 182–183 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11950

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