Science & Technology: Study Links Plumes to Geothermal Hotspots

CT scan of Earth links deep mantle plumes with volcanic hotspots (Berkeley News)

University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland.

Essentially a computed tomography, or CT scan, of Earth’s interior, the picture emerged from a supercomputer simulation at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The new picture also shows that the bases of these plumes are anchored at the core-mantle boundary in two huge blobs of hot rock, each about 5,000 kilometers in diameter, that are likely denser than surrounding rock. Senior author Barbara Romanowicz, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science estimates that those two anchors — directly opposite one another under Africa and the Pacific Ocean — have been in the same spots for 250 million years.

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