The Long-Standing Antarctic Mantle Plume Hypothesis and Modeling Ongoing Glacial Isostatic Adjustment
Abstract
Alkaline basalts of the Marie Byrd Land (MBL) have been interpreted as evidence of a mantle plume impinging on the lithosphere from below at about 85-80 Ma and again at 30-20 Ma. Because of the lack of structural and stratigraphic mapping due to ice sheet cover, and even a general lack of sufficient bottom topography, it is impossible to identify and classify the main characteristics of such a putative plume with respect to ones that are well-studied, such as the Yellowstone or Raton hotspots. Recent POLENET seismic mapping has identified possible plume structures that could extend across the upper mantle beneath the Ruppert Coast (RC) in southeast MBL, and possible plume beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench (BST), some 1000 km to the southwest of RC, and on the opposite side of MBL. Mapping of subglacial lakes via altimetry allows reconstruction of basal conditions that are consistent with melt generation rates and patterns of basal water routing. We extensively model the hotspot heat flux caused by a plume buried beneath the crust of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and employing set of 3-D thermomechanical Stokes flow simulations with the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM). We discover that a mantle upwelling structure beneath the BST, upstream of Subglacial Lake Whillans (SLW) and Whillans Ice Stream is compatible when the peak plume-related geothermal heat flux, qGHF, approaches 200 mW/m^2, rather consistent with heat flux measurements at the WISSARD core site where heat flux probes penetrated into sediments of SLW. For a plume at RC the ISSM predictions do allow a plume, consistent with seismic mapping, but require the peak plume flux to be upper bound by qGHF ≤ 150 mW/m^2. New maps of the relatively slower upper mantle shear wave velocity beneath WAIS reveal that the slowest velocity corresponds to mantle below MLB. Using our new constraints on a 3-D plume interpretation of this slowness, we determine the perturbations to GIA modeling that are required to be additionally consistent with ice history and GNSS secular uplift constraints.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.C22C..01I
- Keywords:
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- 0720 Glaciers;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 1225 Global change from geodesy;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 1621 Cryospheric change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 7230 Seismicity and tectonics;
- SEISMOLOGY