A catalogue of deep mantle plumes: New results from finite‐frequency tomography

Abstract

New finite‐frequency tomographic images of S‐wave velocity confirm the existence of deep mantle plumes below a large number of known hot spots. We compare S‐anomaly images with an updated P‐anomaly model. Deep mantle plumes are present beneath Ascension, Azores, Canary, Cape Verde, Cook Island, Crozet, Easter, Kerguelen, Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti. Afar, Atlantic Ridge, Bouvet(Shona), Cocos/Keeling, Louisville, and Reunion are shown to originate at least below the upper mantle if not much deeper. Plumes that reach only to midmantle are present beneath Bowie, Hainan, Eastern Australia, and Juan Fernandez; these plumes may have tails too thin to observe in the lowermost mantle, but the images are also consistent with an interpretation as “dying plumes” that have exhausted their source region. In the tomographic images, only the Eifel and Seychelles plumes are unambiguously confined to the upper mantle. Starting plumes are visible in the lowermost mantle beneath South of Java, East of Solomon, and in the Coral Sea. All imaged plumes are wide and fail to show plumeheads, suggesting a very weakly temperature‐dependent viscosity for lower mantle minerals, and/or compositional variations. The S‐wave velocity images show several minor differences with respect to the earlier P‐wave results, including plume conduits that extend down to the core‐mantle boundary beneath Cape Verde, Cook Island, and Kerguelen. A more substantial disagreement between P‐wave and S‐wave images reopens the question on the depth extent of the Iceland plume. We suggest that a pulsating behavior of the plume may explain the shape of the conduit beneath Iceland.