Abstract
A decade has passed since Morgan (1972) turned Wilson’s (1963) hotspots into deep mantle convection plumes, and other workers (e.,g., Vogt, 1971, 1974; Schilling, 1973) first applied these ideas to the Iceland phenomenon. Although the basic hypotheses remain unchanged, the data libraries and reprint files have filled out considerably on this subject. This volume on the Greenland-Scotland Ridge (GSR) is an appropriate and timely occasion to review the status of the Iceland mantle plume hypothesis. Not all aspects can be examined in’this short review; geochemistry in particular is excluded. We begin by briefly considering whether a deep plume could exist under Iceland; next comes a discussion of hotspot fixity in light of known relative and absolute motions of the Eurasia (EURA) and North America (NOAM) plates, the geometry of the GSR, and the early Tertiary magmatic activity on adjacent continents. Finally we review the various kinds of anomalous “imprints” the Iceland hotspot has left on the ca. 3×106km2 oceanic crust affected by this phenomenon.
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Vogt, P.R. (1983). The Iceland Mantle Plume: Status of the Hypothesis After a Decade of New Work. In: Bott, M.H.P., Saxov, S., Talwani, M., Thiede, J. (eds) Structure and Development of the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Nato Conference Series, vol 8. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3485-9_11
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