Thermal and chemical structure of the Iceland plume

Abstract

Basaltic lavas, forming thick offshore seaward-dipping reflector sequences (SDRS) and onshore igneous provinces around the North Atlantic margins, represent melting of anomalously hot mantle in the head of the ancestral Iceland plume. Some of these lavas are chemically and isotopically indistinguishable from recent Icelandic basalt, but others more closely resemble basalt erupted at normal segments of mid-ocean ridges (N-MORB). In this paper we show that Icelandic basalt and N-MORB define parallel tight arrays on a plot oflog(Nb/Y) against log(Zr/Y), with N-MORB relatively deficient in Nb. Deficiency or excess of Nb, relative to the lower bound of the Iceland array, may be expressed as Δ N b = 1.74 + log ⁡ ( N b / Y ) − 1.92 log ⁡ ( Z r / Y ) such that Icelandic basalt has ΔNb > 0 and N-MORB has ΔNb < 0. ΔNb is a fundamental source characteristic and is insensitive to the effects of variable degrees of mantle melting, source depletion through melt extraction, crustal contamination of the magmas, or subsequent alteration. We use new and published Nb, Zr and Y data to identify the mantle sources for Palaeocene and Eocene basaltic lavas erupted around the Atlantic margins in order to deduce the thermal and compositional structure of the head of the ancestral Iceland plume. The results show that the head of the plume was zoned, with an axial zone of Icelandic mantle surrounded by a thick outer shell of anomalously hot but compositionally normal N-MORB-source mantle. The zoning is very similar in scale and character to that seen today along the Reykjanes Ridge and is difficult to reconcile with the initiation of rifting and SDRS formation through the impact of a large plume head originating solely from the lower mantle. The thick outer shell of hot, depleted upper mantle, which formed more than half the volume of the plume head, suggests that at least part of the plume originated in the thermal boundary layer at the base of the upper mantle.