Absolute plate motions relative to deep mantle plumes

Advances in whole waveform seismic tomography have revealed the presence of broad mantle plumes rooted at the base of the Earth's mantle beneath major hotspots. Hotspot tracks associated with these deep mantle plumes provide ideal constraints for inverting absolute plate motions as well as testing the fixed hotspot hypothesis. In this paper, 27 observed hotspot trends associated with 24 deep mantle plumes are used together with the MORVEL model for relative plate motions to determine an absolute plate motion model, in terms of a maximum likelihood optimization for angular data fitting, combined with an outlier data detection procedure based on statistical tests. The obtained T25M model fits 25 observed trends of globally distributed hotspot tracks to the statistically required level, while the other two hotspot trend data (Comores on Somalia and Iceland on Eurasia) are identified as outliers, which are significantly incompatible with other data. For most hotspots with rate data available, T25M predicts plate velocities significantly lower than the observed rates of hotspot volcanic migration, which cannot be fully explained by biased errors in observed rate data. Instead, the apparent hotspot motions derived by subtracting the observed hotspot migration velocities from the T25M plate velocities exhibit a combined pattern of being opposite to plate velocities and moving towards mid-ocean ridges. The newly estimated net rotation of the lithosphere is statistically compatible with three recent estimates, but differs significantly from 30 of 33 prior estimates.