Monday, November 28, 2016

Science & Technology: New Measurements Suggests More Geothermal Heat Below Iceland

A Significantly Hotter Mantle Beneath Iceland (EOS)

View from MARS, by Robert Zierenberg. View from the Mid Atlantic Ridge spreading center where it come ashore on the Reykjanes Peninsula.
Estimates of crystallization temperatures from four eruptions in northern Iceland offer improved constraints on the mantle's temperature beneath this anomalous divergent plate boundary.

Because the mantle’s temperature cannot be measured directly, scientists have devised a number of creative methods to derive this information, but these have produced widely varying results. Now Matthews et al. offer new constraints on this parameter beneath Iceland, one of the few places on Earth where a divergent plate boundary is subaerially exposed because of an anomalously large amount of melting occurring beneath the island.


(Thanks to GRC Member Marcelo Lippmann, Staff Scientist (retired) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the submission.)