Flood basalts and ocean island basalts: A deep source or shallow entrainment?

Basalts from continental flood basalts (CFBs) and intraplate or hotspot ocean islands are found to have distinct geochemical signatures. This diversity in composition is generally believed to result from the upwelling plume entraining overlying reservoirs of shallow and intermediate depth mantle material during its ascent from the deep mantle. Here we present laboratory experiments and numerical model calculations which clarify that — for a strongly temperature dependent viscosity like that of the mantle — a rising plume head should be expected to bring up a surrounding sheath of deep mantle from its source region. Mixing between the central core of the plume and this sheath produces the whorl-like structures noted in previous studies where they were typically attributed to thermal entrainment of surrounding ambient mantle, but this is mainly the product of intermixing between neighboring parts of the plume's deep source material. These results imply that the popular idea that mantle plumes should typically mix small fractions of deep ‘primitive’ mantle material with much larger fractions of shallower depleted mantle needs to be critically reexamined.