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A channelled plume under Africa

Nature volume 395, pages 743–744 (1998)Cite this article

Large areas of east Africa are and have been highly active geologically, but the underlying processes are debated. New modelling work may shed light on those processes and also illustrates the growing maturity of such studies.

For Earth scientists, the African continent and its surroundings are a distinctive and rich laboratory. Among many noteworthy features, Africa has the highest mean elevation of all of the continents; it hosts the great east African rift system; there is young and active seafloor spreading in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden; great volumes of volcanic deposits are found in the northeast; and minor volcanism and associated rifting of the crust are scattered across a huge area of the eastern, central and northern parts of the continent. Because all of these features are suggestive of warm or upwelling mantle under Africa, they have been seen for some time as potentially involving mantle plumes — narrow, hot upwellings inside the Earth that were first proposed by W. Jason Morgan1 in 1971.

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Figure 1: Ebinger and Sleep's4 proposal for how a mantle plume interacting with topography on the base of the lithosphere might explain scattered volcanism across a very broad region of east Africa.

References

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  1. the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Canberra, Australia

    Geoff Davies

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  1. Geoff Davies
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Davies, G. A channelled plume under Africa. Nature 395, 743–744 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/27320

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