Significance of an Active Volcanic Front in the Far Western Aleutian Arc

Abstract:

Discovery of a volcanic front west of Buldir Volcano, the western-most emergent Aleutian volcano, demonstrates that the surface expression of Aleutian volcanism falls below sea level just west of 175.9° E longitude, but is otherwise continuous from mainland Alaska to Kamchatka. The newly discovered sites of western Aleutian seafloor volcanism are the Ingenstrem Depression, a 60 km-long structural depression just west of Buldir, and an unnamed area 300 km further west, referred to as the Western Cones. These locations fall along a volcanic front that stretches from Buldir to Piip Seamount near the Komandorsky Islands. Western Aleutian seafloor volcanic rocks include large quantities of high-silica andesite and dacite, which define a highly calc-alkaline igneous series and carry trace element signatures that are unmistakably subduction-related. This indicates that subducting oceanic lithosphere is present beneath the westernmost Aleutian arc. The rarity of earthquakes below depths of 200 km indicates that the subducting plate is unusually hot. Some seafloor volcanoes are 6-8 km wide at the base, and so are as large as many emergent Aleutian volcanoes. The seafloor volcanoes are submerged in water depths >3000 m because they sit on oceanic lithosphere of the Bering Sea. The volcanic front is thus displaced to the north of the ridge of arc crust that underlies the western Aleutian Islands. This displacement, which developed since approximately 6 Ma when volcanism was last active on the islands, must be a consequence of oblique convergence in a system where the subducting plate and large blocks of arc crust are both moving primarily in an arc-parallel sense. The result is a hot-slab system where low subduction rates probably limit advection of hot mantle to the subarc, and produce a relatively cool and perhaps stagnant mantle wedge. The oceanic setting and highly oblique subduction geometry also severely limit rates of sediment subduction, so the volcanic rocks, which are dominantly high-Mg no. andesite and dacite, have isotopic compositions approaching Pacific MORB. Without recycled sediment and in the absence of an extensive mantle melt component, the geochemical pattern that emerges in western Aleutian volcanic rocks appears to be one derived primarily by partial melting of subducted basalt under eclogite conditions.