Mantle plume

A mantle plume is a proposed mechanism of convection within the Earth's mantle, hypothesized to explain anomalous volcanism. Because the plume head partially melts on reaching shallow depths, a plume is often invoked as the cause of volcanic hotspots, such as Hawaii or Iceland, and large igneous provinces such as the Deccan and Siberian Traps. Some such volcanic regions lie far from tectonic plate boundaries, while others represent unusually large-volume volcanism near plate boundaries.

Mantle plumes were first proposed by J. Tuzo Wilson in 1963 and further developed by W. Jason Morgan in 1971 and 1972. A mantle plume is posited to exist where super-heated material forms (nucleates) at the core-mantle boundary and rises through the Earth's mantle. Rather than a continuous stream, plumes should be viewed as a series of hot bubbles of material. Reaching the brittle upper Earth's crust they form diapirs. These diapirs are "hotspots" in the crust. In particular, the concept that mantle plumes are fixed relative to one another and anchored at the core-mantle boundary would provide a natural explanation for the time-progressive chains of older volcanoes seen extending out from some such hotspots, for example, the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain. However, paleomagnetic data show that mantle plumes can also be associated with Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs) and do move relative to each other.

The current mantle plume theory is that material and energy from Earth's interior are exchanged with the surface crust in two distinct and largely independent convective flows:

The plume hypothesis was simulated by laboratory experiments in small fluid-filled tanks in the early 1970s. Thermal or compositional fluid-dynamical plumes produced in that way were presented as models for the much larger postulated mantle plumes. Based on these experiments, mantle plumes are now postulated to comprise two parts: a long thin conduit connecting the top of the plume to its base, and a bulbous head that expands in size as the plume rises. The entire structure resembles a mushroom. The bulbous head of thermal plumes forms because hot material moves upward through the conduit faster than the plume itself rises through its surroundings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, experiments with thermal models showed that as the bulbous head expands it may entrain some of the adjacent mantle into itself.

The size and occurrence of mushroom mantle plumes can be predicted by the transient instability theory of Tan and Thorpe. The theory predicts mushroom-shaped mantle plumes with heads of about 2000 km diameter that have a critical time (time from onset of heating of the lower mantle to formation of a plume) of about 830 million years for a core mantle heat flux of 20 mW/m², while the cycle time (the time between plume formation events) is about 2000 million years. The number of mantle plumes is predicted to be about 17.

When a plume head encounters the base of the lithosphere, it is expected to flatten out against this barrier and to undergo widespread decompression melting to form large volumes of basalt magma. It may then erupt onto the surface. Numerical modelling predicts that melting and eruption will take place over several million years. These eruptions have been linked to flood basalts, although many of those erupt over much shorter time scales (less than 1 million years). Examples include the Deccan Traps in India, the Siberian Traps of Asia, the Karoo-Ferrar basalts/dolerites in South Africa and Antarctica, the Paraná and Etendeka traps in South America and Africa (formerly a single province separated by opening of the South Atlantic Ocean), and the Columbia River basalts of North America. Flood basalts in the oceans are known as oceanic plateaus, and include the Ontong Java Plateau of the western Pacific Ocean and the Kerguelen Plateau of the Indian Ocean.

The narrow vertical conduit, postulated to connect the plume head to the core-mantle boundary, is viewed as providing a continuous supply of magma to a hotspot. As the overlying tectonic plate moves over this hotspot, the eruption of magma from the fixed plume onto the surface is expected to form a chain of volcanoes that parallels plate motion. The Hawaiian Islands chain in the Pacific Ocean is the archetypal example. It has recently been discovered that the volcanic locus of this chain has not been fixed over time, and it thus joined the club of the many type examples that do not exhibit the key characteristic originally proposed.

The eruption of continental flood basalts is often associated with continental rifting and breakup. This has led to the hypothesis that mantle plumes contribute to continental rifting and the formation of ocean basins.