Search for deep slabs in the Northwest Pacific mantle

Mantle updrafts and mechanisms of oceanic volcanism

Convection in an isolated planet is characterized by narrow downwellings and broad updrafts--consequences of Archimedes' principle, the cooling required by the second law of thermodynamics, and the effect of compression on material properties. A mature cooling planet with a conductive low-viscosity core develops a thick insulating surface boundary layer with a thermal maximum, a subadiabatic interior, and a cooling highly conductive but thin boundary layer above the core. Parts of the surface layer sink into the interior, displacing older, colder material, which is entrained by spreading ridges. Magma characteristics of intraplate volcanoes are derived from within the upper boundary layer. Upper mantle features revealed by seismic tomography and that are apparently related to surface volcanoes are intrinsically broad and are not due to unresolved narrow jets. Their morphology, aspect ratio, inferred ascent rate, and temperature show that they are passively responding to downward fluxes, as appropriate for a cooling planet that is losing more heat through its surface than is being provided from its core or from radioactive heating. Response to doward flux is the inverse of the heat-pipe/mantle-plume mode of planetary cooling. Shear-driven melt extraction from the surface boundary layer explains volcanic provinces such as Yellowstone, Hawaii, and Samoa. Passive upwellings from deeper in the upper mantle feed ridges and near-ridge hotspots, and others interact with the sheared and metasomatized surface layer. Normal plate tectonic processes are responsible both for plate boundary and intraplate swells and volcanism.

Plate Tectonics and Hotspots: The Third Dimension

High-resolution seismic tomographic models of the upper mantle provide powerful new constraints on theories of plate tectonics and hotspots. Midocean ridges have extremely low seismic velocities to a depth of 100 kilometers. These low velocities imply partial melting. At greater depths, low-velocity and high-velocity anomalies record, respectively, previous positions of migrating ridges and trenches. Extensional, rifting, and hotspot regions have deep (> 200 kilometers) low-velocity anomalies. The upper mantle is characterized by vast domains of high temperature rather than small regions surrounding hotspots; the asthenosphere is not homogeneous or isothermal. Extensive magmatism requires a combination of hot upper mantle and suitable lithospheric conditions. High-velocity regions of the upper 200 kilometers of the mantle correlate with Archean cratons.

Mantle Phase Changes and Deep-Earthquake Faulting in Subducting Lithosphere

Inclined zones of earthquakes are the primary expression of lithosphere subduction. A distinct deep population of subduction-zone earthquakes occurs at depths of 350 to 690 kilometers. At those depths ordinary brittle fracture and frictional sliding, the faulting processes of shallow earthquakes, are not expected. A fresh understanding of these deep earthquakes comes from developments in several areas of experimental and theoretical geophysics, including the discovery and characterization of transformational faulting, a shear instability connected with localized phase transformations under nonhydrostatic stress. These developments support the hypothesis that deep earthquakes represent transformational faulting in a wedge of olivine-rich peridotite that is likely to persist metastably in coldest plate interiors to depths as great as 690 km. Predictions based on this deep structure of mantle phase changes are consistent with the global depth distribution of deep earthquakes, the maximum depths of earthquakes in individual subductions zones, and key source characteristics of deep events.