Is the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend Coeval for all Pacific Seamount Trails?

By far the largest number of hotspots can be found in the South Pacific Thermal and Isotopic Anomaly (SOPITA). Its Cretaceous counterpart is preserved in a large range of seamounts and guyots found in the West Pacific Seamount Province (WPSP). The seamounts in these regions display very distinct and long-lived isotopic signatures (Staudigel et al., 1991; Koppers et al., 2003) that can be used to combine source region chemistry and seamount geochronology to map out mantle melting anomalies over geological time. These mappings may resolve many important questions regarding the stationary character, continuity and longevity of the hotspots in the South Pacific mantle. Most importantly, it may also answer the question whether the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend (HEB) is coeval for all Pacific Seamount trails at 47 Ma? Fixed hotspots should be expressed in volcanic trails on the lithospheric plates revealing absolute rates of motion from their age progressions and the direction of motion based on their azimuths. By definition, bends in these hotspot trails thus should give an indication of changing plate motion happening simultaneously across individual lithospheric plates. Based on the morphology of seamounts in the Pacific, the Hawaiian-Emperor, Louisville, Gilbert Ridge and Tokelau seamount trails may be identified as the only hotspot trails to exhibit a clear HEB-type bend (Kroenke et al. 2004). Of these, the Louisville seamount trail only displays a faint bend that may be coeval with the sharp 60 degree bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor trail (Koppers et al. 2004) at 47 Ma. However, new 40Ar/39Ar analyses indicate that the HEB-type bends in the Gilberts Ridge and Tokelau seamount trails are asynchronous around 67 Ma and 57 Ma, respectively. We argue, therefore, that plate motion alone cannot explain these age systematics, but that both hotspot motion and changing lithospheric stress regimes may play an important role in their creation. The simple and elegant hotspot model that (almost without difficulty) may explain primary hotspots such as Hawaii and Louisville, seems unsatisfactory to explain the age distributions of the short-lived Gilbert Ridge and Tokelau hotspots. To explain intra-plate volcanism in the South Pacific, we argue for a combination of processes: one that forces regional magmatism from a large-scale source of buoyancy from below (like the rise of plumelets shooting off the top of a superplume that die-off after a short life-cycle) and one process that acts from above, as intra-plate extension opens up pathways that allow the lithosphere to be penetrated by magma.