Lithospheric control on the Paleogene uplift and volcanism in Ireland and Britain

Abstract

Spectacular Paleogene uplift and volcanism in Ireland and Britain are thought to be associated with the Iceland Plume but their mechanisms are still unclear, considering, in particular, that the Iceland Hotspot was many hundred kilometres away from the volcanism. We obtain new insights into the mechanisms by combining new evidence from seismic tomography, petrological inversion of seismic data, and the geological data on uplift and volcanism. Optimal resolution tomography is a new approach, developed for surface wave tomography, that allows us to find the optimal resolving length at every point of a tomographic model grid. With this approach we evaluate the posterior model error at a point of the model grid empirically, estimating it by isolating the roughness of the phase-velocity curve that cannot be explained by any Earth structure. We apply this method to the region of Ireland and Britain, using more than 11,000 interstation phase-velocity curves measured at station pairs recording simultaneously, to image the lithosphere and underlying mantle beneath the area. The use of cross-correlation of teleseismic earthquakes and waveform inversion produces measurements in a very broad period range, leads to an unprecedented data coverage of the region, and allows us to unveil exciting new insights into the structure and evolution of the area, from the crust to the deep asthenosphere at a unprecedented level of detail.The composite, optimal resolution phase-velocity maps are inverted for a 3-D VS model, which reveals pronounced, previously unknown variations in the lithospheric thickness beneath the area. The model shows evidence of a robust, low-velocity anomaly beneath the Irish Sea and its surroundings that persists in the models from ~60 to at least 140 km depth, indicating an anomalously thin lithosphere and demonstrating that the assumption of a nearly constant lithospheric thickness across the area, previously adopted, is not valid. Phase velocity data at key locations are inverted using integrated geophysical-petrological inversion, to estimate the thermal structure of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system consistent with the seismic data, surface elevation, and heat-flow. The circum-Irish Sea area reveals a pronounced lithospheric thinning and matches the region of the Paleogene uplift previously suggested to be caused by a lateral branch of the Iceland mantle plume, which may have flowed into thin lithosphere areas surrounded by continental lithosphere during the evolution of the North Atlantic Ocean over the past 60 M.y. Our results show a striking correlation between lithospheric thickness and exhumation thermochronological measurements (as well as proposed underplating thickness, denudation, and the locations of the intraplate volcanism of the enigmatic North Atlantic Igneous Province) suggesting a significant lithospheric control on the volcanism of the area.