The Hainan Lone Plume Prompted By Encircling Subduction Zones around the South China Sea

The present of the late Mesozoic Hainan plume originated from the lower mantle of northern South China Sea has been documented by both seismic tomographic and geochemical-petrological work. The Hainan plume is one of the rare mantle plumes that are located away from the two large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs) in the lower mantle. Instead, it is within the broad global mantle downwelling zone, thus classified as a "lone plume". It had previously been proposed that this plume could have been triggered by subducting slabs into the lower mantle in the regions surrounding the South China Sea, a mechanism similar to what had been proposed for the formation of the LLSVPs. Here, we investigate the feasibility of such a plume-generation mechanism use a geodynamic modelling. Our geodynamic model has a high resolution regional domain embedded in a relatively low resolution global domain, which is set up in an adoptive-mesh-refined, 3D mantle convection code ASPECT. The top mechanic boundary condition of the global domain uses the latest plate motion reconstruction. In a series of experiments, we explore the effects of various important mantle parameters on mantle plume generation. The results so far suggest that the Indo-Australian cold slab acted like a cold wall from the southwest side in the present-day South China Sea mantle domain since 80 Ma ago. Fossil slabs from much older Tethyan subduction systems plays a moderate role in blocking the deep mantle hot materials from escaping to the north. The Western Pacific subduction systems started to promote the initiation of Hainan plume some 50 Ma ago from near the core-mantle boundary (CMB). As the plume head rises, it first moved to the west, and finally to beneath the South China Sea. Our model results are not sensitive to whether there is a chemical layer (possible D" layer) near the CMB.