Volcanic island and seamount chains form from deep-seated plumes of hot material upwelling through the mantle. The most famous of these is the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain. However, a large volcanic structure associated with a plume head that …
Slab orphaning is a newly discovered phenomenological behavior, where the slab tip breaks off at the top of the lower mantle (~660 km depth) and is abandoned by its parent slab. Upon orphaning, subduction continues uninterrupted through the lateral …
Water content plays a vital role in determining mantle rheology and thus mantle convection and plate tectonics. Most parameterised convection models predict that Earth initially underwent a period of rapid degassing and heating, followed by a slow …
Several theoretical studies indicate that a substantial fraction of the measured seismic anisotropy could be interpreted as extrinsic anisotropy associated with compositional layering in rocks, reducing the significance of strain-induced intrinsic …
As the Earth's primary mode of planetary cooling, the oceanic plate is created at mid-ocean ridges, transported across the planet's surface, and destroyed at subduction zones. The evolution of its buoyancy and rheology during its lifespan maintains …
The sinking remnant of a surface plate crosses and interacts with multiple boundaries in Earth's interior. Here, we specifically investigate the prominent dynamic interaction of the sinking plate portion with the upper-mantle transition zone and its …
Mantle convection can drive long-wavelength and low-amplitude topography, which can occur synchronously and superimposed to tectonics. The discrimination between these two topographic components, however, is difficult to assert. This is because there …
The long-wavelength surface deflection of Earth's outermost rocky shell is mainly controlled by large-scale dynamic processes like isostasy or mantle flow. The largest topographic amplitudes are therefore observed at plate boundaries due to the …
In order to link the geochemical signature of hot spot basalts to Earth's deep interior, it is first necessary to understand how plumes sample different regions of the mantle. Here, we investigate the relative amounts of deep and shallow mantle …
Measurements of the velocity field associated with plumes rising through a viscous fluid are performed using stereoscopic Particle-Image Velocimetry in the Rayleigh number range 4.4 x 10(5)-6.4 x 10(5). The experimental model is analogous to a mantle …