Plates vs. Plumes Debate
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Abstract
Early in the 21st century, scientists became increasingly skeptical about the deep-mantle plume hypothesis. This postulates that unusual volcanism results from thermal diapirs ("plumes") that originate at the core-mantle boundary and deliver hot material via narrow conduits to Earth's surface. Hawaii is the type example, but many tens of other localities including Iceland, the Eifel volcanic field, and the Siberian traps, have been attributed to plumes.
As geological and geophysical observations exploded in both number and detail, in recent years, many scientists became persuaded that the predictions of the plume hypothesis were not convincingly confirmed. Predictions such as precursory domal uplift, and time-progressive volcanic trails, are not observed at many volcanic regions formerly assumed to be due to plumes. Scientists thus turned their attention to developing alternative models. The strongest of these is the Plate model, which attributes unusual volcanism simply to the by-products of plate tectonics–processes such as continental rifting, slab break-off, shallow convection, and the recycling of fusible, subducted crust in the source regions of mid-ocean ridge basalts.
The ongoing debate regarding which model, if either, is correct, is hosted online by the website mentleplumes.org which has been built from the contributions of over 500 scientists of all shades of opinion. Three recent books have been devoted to the subject, two published by the Geological Society of America (Plates, Plumes, and Paradigms, Special Paper 388, and Plates, Plumes, and Planetary Processes, Special Paper 430) plus a textbook published by Wiley-Blackwell (Plates vs. Plumes: A Geological Controversy, by Gillian R. Foulger).
References
Foulger, G. R., and D. M. Jurdy (2007), Plates, Plumes, and Planetary Processes, Geological Society of America, Special Paper 430, 997+ix pp.
Foulger, G. R. (2010), Plates vs Plumes: A Geological Controversy, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, U.K., xii+328 pp.
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