A Beginner's Guide to: How to find invisible plume tracks

Convective upwellings within the Earth's mantle, so-called mantle plumes, shape our planet by causing (massive) volcanic eruptions throughout space and time. Direct consequences include closed airports, destroyed fields, and growing islands, but also ice melting, mass extinctions, and continental breakups. For our understanding of Earth's evolution, it is, therefore, crucial to know how the tectonic plates moved relative to the plumes, and which parts of the plate have been subject to plume-lithosphere interaction. While plume tracks are rather obvious for thin oceanic plates, their signal remains largely hidden from the eye beneath continents and cratons. This beginner's guide will tackle the question of what observations we might use to identify these enigmatic continental plume tracks, and show that plume-lithosphere interactions may have important implications millions of years after they happened.