Variations in the electrical conductivity of the upper mantle beneath North America and the Pacific Ocean

Abstract

Variations in the electrical conductivity of the mantle beneath Carty Lake in the Canadian Shield, Tucson in the southwest United States, and Honolulu and Midway in the north central Pacific were determined through the inversion of long‐period magnetotelluric and geomagnetic depth sounding data. Inversion of computed response functions is carried out using a minimum structure, regularized approach. The upper mantle beneath Carty Lake is approximately an order of magnitude more resistive than the upper mantle beneath Tucson and nearly 1.5 orders of magnitude more resistive than Honolulu and Midway Island. Inversions were also carried out where the minimum structure constraint was removed at known upper mantle discontinuities. These models show a jump in conductivity of ∼1.5 orders of magnitude across the 660 km discontinuity, a result that is consistent with laboratory experiments on realistic mantle assemblages. Mantle conductivity profiles at Carty Lake are significantly more resistive than those at Tucson, Honolulu, and Midway to depths of ∼300–400 km. These observations likely reflect differing thermal states, the presence (or absence) of partial melt and volatiles, and may also be related to chemical differences between depleted and undepleted upper mantle. The observed conductivity variations may be interpreted as lateral variations in temperature, partial melt, and/or dissolved hydrogen in olivine.