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Anomalous mantle transition zone beneath the Yellowstone hotspot track

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 449–453 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

The origin of the Yellowstone and Snake River Plain volcanism has been strongly debated. The mantle plume model successfully explains the age-progressive volcanic track, but a deep plume structure has been absent in seismic imaging. Here I apply diffractional tomography to receiver functions recorded at USArray stations to map high-resolution topography of mantle transition-zone discontinuities. The images reveal a trail of anomalies that closely follow the surface hotspot track and correlate well with a seismic wave-speed gap in the subducting Farallon slab. This observation contradicts the plume model, which requires anomalies in the mid mantle to be confined in a narrow region directly beneath the present-day Yellowstone caldera. I propose an alternative interpretation of the Yellowstone volcanism. About 16 million years ago, a section of young slab that had broken off from a subducted spreading centre in the mantle first penetrated the 660 km discontinuity beneath Oregon and Idaho, and pulled down older stagnant slab. Slab tearing occurred along pre-existing fracture zones and propagated northeastward. This reversed-polarity subduction generated passive upwellings from the lower mantle, which ascended through a water-rich mantle transition zone to produce melting and age-progressive volcanism.

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Fig. 1: Location of the Yellowstone hotspot track.
Fig. 2: Mantle transition-zone discontinuities from receiver function diffraction tomography.
Fig. 3: 3D rendering and re-examination of S-wave slab anomalies in the western United States.
Fig. 4: Cartoon illustration of the stages of subduction in the western United States (not to scale).
Fig. 5: Cartoon illustration of reversed subduction (not to scale).
Fig. 6: Sketch of the Pacific and Farallon fracture zones.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants EAR-1737737 and EAR-1348131. Advanced Research Computing at Virginia Tech provided computational resources.

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  1. Department of Geosciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Ying Zhou

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Zhou, Y. Anomalous mantle transition zone beneath the Yellowstone hotspot track. Nature Geosci 11, 449–453 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0126-4

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