Modeling Plume-Triggered, Melt-Enabled Lithospheric Delamination

Abstract:

It has been suggested that arrival of the Yellowstone plume below North America triggered a lithospheric foundering event which aided the eruption of the Columbia River flood basalts. This hypothesis potentially accounts for some of the biggest mysteries related to the CRB's including their location as “off-track” plume volcanism; and the anomalous chemical signatures of the most voluminous units.

The foundered lithosphere appears to be a remnant chunk of Farallon slab, which had been stranded beneath the Blue Mountains terrain since the accretion of Siletzia. If this is the case then the mechanisms by which this slab stayed metastable between Siletzia accretion and CRB time, and then so suddenly broke loose, is unclear. The addition of heat and mantle buoyancy supplied by the Yellowstone plume provides a clue, but the geodynamic process by which the slab was able to detach remains unclear.

Efforts to model numerically the underlying processes behind delamination events have been gaining popularity. Typically, such models have relied on drastically weakened regions within the crust, or highly non-linear rheologies to enable initiation and propagation of lithosphere removal. Rather than impose such a weak region a priori, we investigated the role of mantle and crustal melt, generated by the addition of plume heat, as the source of such a rheologic boundary.

We track melt generation and migration though geodynamic models using the Eulerian finite element code, ASPECT. Melt moves relative to the permeable, compacting, and viscously-deforming mantle using the approach of (Keller, et al. 2013) with the notable exception that ASPECT currently cannot model elasticity. Dike and sill emplacement is therefore still a work in progress. This work is still in the preliminary stages and results are yet inconclusive.