The Pacific basal mantle structure could be older than the African one

Abstract

Plate tectonics shapes Earth’s surface and is linked to motions within its deep interior. Cold oceanic lithosphere sinks into the mantle, and hot mantle plumes rise from the deep Earth, leading to volcanism. Volcanic eruptions over the past 320 million years have been linked to two large structures at the base of the mantle presently under Africa and the Pacific Ocean. This has led to the hypothesis that these basal mantle structures could have been stationary over geological time, in contrast to observations and models suggesting that tectonic plates, subduction zones, and mantle plumes have been mobile and that basal mantle structures are presently deforming. Here we reconstruct mantle flow from one billion years ago to the present day to show that the history of volcanism is statistically as consistent with mobile basal mantle structures as with fixed ones. In our reconstructions, cold lithosphere sank deep into the African hemisphere between 740 and 500 million years ago, and from 400 million years ago the structure beneath Africa progressively assembled, pushed by peri-Gondwana slabs, to become a coherent structure as recently as 60 million years ago. In contrast, the structure beneath the Pacific Ocean was established between 400 and 200 million years ago. These results confirm the link between basal mantle structures and surface volcanism, and they suggest that basal mantle structures are mobile, and aggregate and disperse over time, similarly to continents at Earth’s surface. This implies that the present-day shape and location of basal mantle structures may not be a suitable reference frame for the motion of tectonic plates.