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Mantle geochemistry

Unmixing Hawaiian cocktails

Nature volume 399, pages 733–734 (1999)Cite this article

Geochemical data can tell us a great deal about processes in Earth's mantle, but obtaining that data and interpreting it are far from straightforward. If confirmation of that point were needed it comes from papers by Lassiter and Hauri1, and Putirka2, both of which involve analysis of Hawaiian lavas but which come to rather different conclusions about their origins.

Lassiter and Hauri present evidence from osmium isotopes to support the idea3,4 that the Hawaiian mantle plume — like other plumes, a hot and buoyant jet-like structure that melts as it approaches Earth's surface — is an ancient slab of subducted ocean floor. But they go further and claim that the original variations in isotopic composition with depth in the ocean floor have survived mantle stirring and can now be seen as geographically distributed trends among the Hawaiian lavas. This is remarkable, because it implies that there was little distortion of the slab despite a billion years of mantle convection.

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Figure 1: Production of mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB), and of ocean island basalt (OIB) such as that which forms Hawaii, as seen in the slab-recycling model.

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for Isotope Geology and Mineral Resources, ETH Zentrum, NO C61, Sonneggstrasse 5, Zürich, CH-8092, Switzerland

    Alex N. Halliday

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  1. Alex N. Halliday
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Halliday, A. Unmixing Hawaiian cocktails. Nature 399, 733–734 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/21533

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