Joint geodynamical and seismic modelling of the Eifel plume

Abstract

SUMMARY Teleseismic P-wave tomography has revealed a columnar low-velocity anomaly in the upper mantle below the volcanic Eifel region in western Germany extending to at least 400 km depth. Here we explore whether a geodynamically consistent model of a mantle plume can explain the observed traveltime residuals. We use a 3-D mantle convection code with temperature and pressure-dependent viscosity to generate a suite of model plumes that rise from the transition zone and spread below a stationary or drifting lithospheric plate. We use ray tracing to calculate synthetic travel times and vary the plume location, radius, temperature and the rate and direction of plate motion in order to fit the observed travel times. Our results show a fair correlation between synthetic and observed traveltime residuals. The presence of additional structures in the lithosphere and upper mantle of the Eifel region that are not covered by a simple plume model prevents a perfect fit of the observed seismological data and may bias to some degree the derived plume parameters. The traveltime anomalies are mainly caused by the plume stem with smaller contributions from the plume head. Models with and without an axisymetric plume head below the lithosphere fit the data almost equally well and we conclude that the absence of a plume head in tomographic images does not rule out its existence. In the best-fitting model the plume stem has a radius of 60 km and rises about 50 km to the SW of the quaternary volcanic field below a lithosphere that this slowly moving in the NNE direction. The temperature of the plume and its flux cannot be constrained tightly from our model results, but combining them with other constraints we estimate an excess temperature of ∼200 ◦ C and a buoyancy flux of 500–1000 kg s −1 .