4.7 Article

Thermochemical Heterogeneity and Density of Continental and Oceanic Upper Mantle in the European-North Atlantic Region

Journal

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-SOLID EARTH
Volume 124, Issue 8, Pages 9280-9312

Publisher

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2018JB017025

Keywords

lithosphere; crust; mantle depletion; gravity modeling; kimberlites; Iceland hot spot

Funding

  1. Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme [223272]
  2. Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
  3. Danish Fund for Independent Research [DFF-1323-00053]

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We present a new model, EUNA-rho, for the density structure of the continental and oceanic upper mantle based on 3-D tesseroid gravity modeling. On continent, there is no clear difference in lithospheric mantle (LM) density between the cratonic and Phanerozoic Europe, yet an similar to 300-km-wide zone of a high-density LM along the Trans-European Suture Zone may image a paleosubduction. Kimberlite provinces of the Baltica and Greenland cratons have a low-density (3.32 g/cm(3)) mantle where all non-damondiferous kimberlites tend to a higher-density (3.34 g/cm(3)) anomalies. LM density correlates with the depth of sedimentary basins implying that mantle densification plays an important role in basin subsidence. A very dense (3.40-3.45 g/cm(3)) mantle beneath the superdeep platform basins and the East Barents shelf requires the presence of 10-20% of eclogite, while the West Barents Basin has LM density of 3.35 g/cm(3) similar to the Variscan massifs of western Europe. In the North Atlantics, south of the Charlie Gibbs fracture zone (CGFZ) mantle density follows half-space cooling model with significant deviations at volcanic provinces. North of the CGFZ, the entire North Atlantics is anomalous. Strong low-density LM anomalies (< -3%) beneath the Azores and north of the CGFZ correlate with geochemical anomalies and indicate the presence of continental fragments and heterogeneous melting sources. Thermal anomalies in the upper mantle averaged down to the transition zone are 100-150 degrees C at the Azores and can be detected seismically, while a <50 degrees C anomaly around Iceland is at the limit of seismic resolution.

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