Sentences with phrase «mantle plume»

Their findings further substantiate the critical role of mantle plumes in forming large igneous provinces.

Volcanic seamount chains such as Hawaii were created from magma produced near the surface by mantle plumes.

They slow down the seismic waves caused by earthquakes and may be the culprit for deep mantle plumes, which can lead to volcanic hotspots like those that created Yellowstone National Park or the Hawai'ian Islands.

Vertical columns of hot and buoyant rock rising through the mantle from near the core are known as mantle plumes.

Recent models have dismissed the role of mantle plumes in the formation of large igneous provinces, ascribing their origin instead to chemical anomalies in the shallow mantle.

These hot rocks (also called mantle plumes) could migrate to the surface because of buoyancy.

What are the thermal gradients over the great paterae, which may be analogues of mantle plumes on Earth?

These chemically distinct regions also underlie a majority of hotspot volcanism, via hot mantle plumes from the top of the piles to Earth's surface, suggesting a potential link between these ancient, chemically distinct regions and the chemistry of hotspot volcanism.

«Our result shows that mantle plume heads have a significant impact on plate motions,» Cande said.

«Much of solid - Earth science for the past 20 years — and large amounts of money — have been spent looking for elusive narrow mantle plumes that wind their way upward through the mantle,» Anderson says.

The Marie Byrd Land mantle plume formed 50 million to 110 million years ago, long before the West Antarctic ice sheet came into existence, NASA wrote.

Scientists have been debating whether or not mantle plume heat contributes to western Antarctica's instability.

Hot mantle plumes rising up from the core can affect Earth's surface, creating Yellowstone's steaming geysers and Hawaii's spectacular volcanoes.

Nine «hotspots» — areas analogous to Hawaii, with volcanism, broad topographic rises, and large positive gravity anomalies suggesting mantle plumes at depth — have been identified as possibly active.

«Our goal was to figure out how we could use this distribution of volcano compositions at the surface to reverse - engineer how these components are distributed inside this upwelling mantle plume at depth,» Jackson said.

The main question driving this research is how mantle plumes and different compositional components in Earth's mantle interact with each other, and how that interaction leads to the complex chemistry of hotspot basalts.

Where researchers expected to find a large mantle plume, the map of the geologic structure beneath Yellowstone instead seems to show a ghostly fragment of an old tectonic plate — a former chunk of Earth's rocky shell — lodged under the western United States, right near the Yellowstone hot spot.

«This new constraint on plume structure has important implications for how deep mantle material is entrained in plumes, and it gives us the clearest picture yet for the chemical structure of an upwelling mantle plume.»

Scientists think mantle plumes are thin streams of heated rock that makes its way upward, melting ice and creating rivers and lakes of meltwater under Antarctica's western ice sheet.

Scientists have been debating whether or not mantle plume heat contributes to western Antarctica's instability.

The Marie Byrd Land mantle plume formed 50 to 110 million years ago, long before the West Antarctic ice sheet came into existence.

The paper, «Influence of a West Antarctic mantle plume on ice sheet basal conditions,» was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Images gathered by University of Oregon scientists using seismic waves penetrating to a depth of 300 kilometers (almost 200 miles) report the discovery of an anomaly that likely is the volcanic mantle plume of the Galapagos Islands.

It is known that material brought to the surface from the deep mantle (via mantle plumes) has a lower ratio than that normally found nearer the surface, for example in the basalts from mid-ocean ridges.

«Earth's hottest, most buoyant mantle plumes draw from a primordial reservoir older than the moon.»

Their results help to explain why mantle plumes are frequently deflected sideways as they extend upward beyond the megameter boundary.

These structures could indicate that mantle plumes once rose from Venus» iron core to the outer layer, thus softening and weakening the planet's surface.

«CT scan of Earth links deep mantle plumes with volcanic hotspots: Scans prove that plumes of hot rock anchored at core - mantle boundary rise to form island chains.»

Previous attempts to image mantle plumes have detected pockets of hot rock rising in areas where plumes have been proposed, but it was unclear whether they were connected to volcanic hotspots at the surface or the roots of the plumes at the core mantle boundary 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the surface.

While medical CTs employ X-rays to probe the body, the scientists mapped mantle plumes by analyzing the paths of seismic waves bouncing around Earth's interior after 273 strong earthquakes that shook the globe over the past 20 years.

«A line of volcanoes hints there might be a hidden mantle plume, like a blowtorch, beneath the plate,» said Doug Wiens, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences and a co-author on the paper.

According to the simulations, some subducted oceanic crust is entrained directly into mantle plumes, but a significant fraction of the crust — up to 10 percent — enters the more primitive reservoirs.

Fouch thinks Yellowstone's restless activity is driven not by a giant mantle plume but rather by mantle material being pushed around the edge of the stranded Farallon fragment.

As a result, mantle plumes entrain a variable combination of relatively young oceanic crust directly from the subducting slab, older oceanic crust that has been stirred with ancient more primitive material and background, depleted mantle.

It seems that the break - up of Gondwana in the South Atlantic and, in general, the role of mantle plumes during the continental break - up needs to be carefully re-evaluated.

Hot ascending mantle plumes in the Earth's mantle are an important driving force in plate tectonics.

«This is consistent with the idea of a relatively deep - seated mantle plume,» she said.

In fact, the scientists found that the Bárðarbunga volcano lies directly above the hottest portion of the North Atlantic mantle plume.

Emry, E., Nyblade, A., Juli, J., Anandakrishnan, S., Aster, R., Wiens, D., Huerta, A., Wilson, T., (2014), Evidence from P - wave receiver functions for lower mantle plumes and mantle transition zone water beneath West Antarctica, Abstract DI41B - 4336, presented at 2014 Fall Meeting, AGU, San Francisco, Calif..

Evidence for the existence of this hotter - than - normal mantle plume has been found in geophysical data and is often referred to as the «African Superswell».

Since the location and size of the possible mantle plume were unknown, they tested a full range of what was physically possible for multiple parameters, producing dozens of different simulations.

The widely accepted mantle plume conjecture has been justified by experiments and calculations that violate the laws of thermodynamics for an isolated cooling planet.

Any rise or major fluctuation in interior gradient could have profound and disruptive effects on processes whose very properties are government by convective heat emanating from the planet's outer core: magnetic field propagation, tectonic plate movements, sea - floor spreading mechanics, and mantle plume activity.

The breakup would have increased explosive arc volcanism and stimulated mantle plumes, which would have spewed huge amounts of material into the atmosphere.

For example, waves move slower when passing through hot magma, such as mantle plumes and hotspots, than they do when passing through colder subduction zones, locations where one tectonic plate slides beneath another.

In fact, he adds, basic physics doesn't support the presence of these jets, called mantle plumes, and the new results corroborate those fundamental ideas.

The components could become embedded in and carried to the surface by mantle plumes, but it is unclear how individual plumes could successively sample each of these reservoirs.

Matthew Jackson, an associate professor in UCSB's Department of Earth Science, and colleagues utilized high - precision lead and helium isotope measurements to unravel the chemical composition and geometry of the deep mantle plume feeding Samoa's volcanoes.

But now, thanks in part to more seismic stations spaced closer together and improved theory, analysis of the planet's seismology is good enough to confirm that there are no narrow mantle plumes, Anderson and Natland say.