The CEED blog - Page 3

Hawaii and Iceland are two well-known "hotspot" locations, with hot, upwelling mantle plumes lying beneath them today. However, plates and plumes move relative to each other, leaving a volcanic trail in their wake. Under oceans, these "hotspot tracks" are relatively easy to identify but under thick continents it is much more difficult. A new study (Heyn and Conrad, 2022) shows how plume tracks can be identified beneath cratons and continents based on seismic observations and heat flux measurements.

The 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the Moon landed on rocks of the Imbrium Basin, the largest impact basin on the Moon – or did it? For 50 years, this statement was considered to be true, but a new study in The Planetary Science Journal describes a thin veneer of rocks from a different basin and challenges this long-held interpretation.

A new study in Nature Communications explains why spreading ridges jump towards the trench in the upper plate of narrow subduction zones. Nicholas Schliffke (Durham Uni.) and co-authors, including CEED researcher Valentina Magni, developed 3D numerical models designed to investigate the forces responsible for breaking up the lithosphere in the upper plate. They found that the occurrence of ridge jumps is controlled by a competition between the strength of the upper plate and the strength of transform faults bounding the plate.

Short-lived volcanic pulses from 201 million years-old rocks hint at anthropogenic-scale CO₂ degassing events. New models reveal the impact of  exceptional magmatic activity on the end-Triassic climate and environment, leading to a devastating mass extinction event. The international collaborative study published in Global and Planetary Change was led by CEED postdoc Manfredo Capriolo.

A new study in Nature Communications demonstrates that carbon release from the Karoo Large Igneous Province (LIP) in southern Africa was responsible for major carbon cycle changes during the Toarcian crisis around 183 million years ago. The Norwegian-French collaboration, led by CEED postdoc Thea Hatlen Heimdal, used a numerical carbon cycle model and found that the release of 20,500 billion tonnes of carbon from the Karoo LIP replicates proxy data for climate change from geological records.