Global P-wave tomography of mantle plumes and subducting slabs

There are many volcanoes on the Earth which can be generally classified into 3 categories: island arc volcanoes, mid-ocean ridge volcanoes, and hotspot volcanoes. Hotspot volcanoes denote intraplate volcanoes like Hawaii, or anomalously large mid-ocean ridge volcanoes like Iceland. So far many researchers have studied the origin of hotspot volcanoes and have used mantle plume hypothesis to explain them. However, we still have little knowledge about mantle plumes yet. In this study, we determined a new model of whole mantle P-wave tomography to understand the origin of hotspot volcanoes. We used the global tomography method of Zhao (2001, 2004). A 3-D grid net was set up in the mantle, and velocity perturbations at every grid nodes were taken as unknown parameters. The iasp91 velocity model (Kennett and Engdahl, 1991) was taken as the 1-D initial model. We selected 9106 earthquakes from the events occurred in the last forty years from the ISC catalog. About 1.6 million arrival-time data of five-type P phases (P, pP, PP, PcP, and Pdiff) were used to conduct the tomographic inversion. In our previous model (Zhao, 2004), the grid interval in the E-W direction is too small in the polar regions. In this study, in order to remedy this problem, we use a flexible-grid approach to make the lateral grid intervals in the polar regions nearly the same as the other portions of the mantle. As a result, the tomographic images in the polar regions are remarkably improved. Our new tomographic model shows huge low-velocity (low-V) zones in the entire mantle under Tahiti and Lake Victoria, which reflect the Pacific and African superplumes, being consistent with the previous studies. A clear low-V zone is revealed under Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica. Other major hotspots also exhibit significant low-V zones in the mantle under their surface locations. Beneath Bering Sea, we found that the Pacific slab is subducting from the Aleutian trench and it is stagnant in the mantle transition zone. In Bering Sea, there are several intraplate volcanoes such as St. Paul island. Given the existence of the stagnant Pacific slab and very low-V mantle wedge above the slab, we think that the origin of the intraplate volcanoes in Bering Sea is most likely related to the deep subduction of the Pacific slab and its stagnancy in the mantle transition zone, similar to the Changbai and Wudalianchi volcanoes in Northeast Asia (Zhao, 2004). Zhao, D. (2001) Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 192, 251-265. Zhao, D. (2004) Phys. Earth Planet. Inter. 146, 3-34.