Mantle Flow beneath Arabia Offset from the Opening Red Sea

The rifting of continents involves a complex and poorly understood sequence of lithospheric stretching, volcanism, and mantle flow that eventually gives rise to seafloor spreading that forms a new ocean basin. The Red Sea, forming as the Arabian plate diverges from Africa, is a classic area for studying this process. Here, we present new insight from joint inversion of seismic wave travel times and waveforms to map velocity structure beneath Arabia and its surroundings. We find the low velocities expected for hot upwelling mantle material centered beneath the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, consistent with the active spreading there. However, this hot material extends not below the northern Red Sea, but is instead offset to the east beneath Arabia, showing northward upper mantle flow from the Afar hotspot. The location of this low velocity channel beneath volcanic rocks erupted since rifting began 30 million years ago indicates that although the flow originates from the hotspot that is essentially fixed in the upper mantle, the channel moves with the Arabian plate. We thus propose that the absence of seafloor spreading in the northern Red Sea reflects the offset mantle flow. Because this offset has existed for millions of years, it is unclear whether it will evolve into seafloor spreading, rifting of Arabia above the channel, or both. This situation has aspects of the end-member models of rifting initiated by either mantle flow or lithospheric extension, and thus shows that the two can occur somewhat independently in different places before coalescing to seafloor spreading.