Investigating Late Cenozoic Mantle Dynamics beneath Yellowstone

Abstract:

Recent tomography models (Sigloch, 2011; Schmandt & Lin, 2014) reveal unprecedented details of the mantle structure beneath the United States (U.S.). Prominent slow seismic anomalies below Yellowstone, traditionally interpreted as due to a mantle plume, are restricted to depths either shallower than 200 km or between 500 and 1000 km, but a continuation to greater depth is missing. Compared to fast seismic anomalies, which are usually interpreted as slabs or delaminated lithosphere, origin of deep slow seismic anomalies, especially those in the vicinity of subduction zones, is more enigmatic. As a consequence, both the dynamics and evolution of these slow anomalies remain poorly understood.

To investigate the origin and evolution of the Yellowstone slow anomaly during the past 20 Myr, we construct a 4D inverse mantle convection model with a hybrid data assimilation scheme. On the one hand, we use the adjoint method to recover the past evolution of mantle seismic structures beyond the subduction zones. On the other hand, we use a high-resolution forward model to simulate the subduction of the oceanic (i.e., Farallon) plate. During the adjoint iterations, features from these two approaches are blended together at a depth of ~200 km below the subduction zone. In practice, we convert fast and slow seismic anomalies to effective positive and negative density heterogeneities. Our preliminary results indicate that at 20 Ma, the present-day shallow slow anomalies beneath the western U.S. were located inside the oceanic asthenosphere, which subsequently entered the mantle wedge, through the segmented Farallon slab. The eastward encroachment of the slow anomaly largely followed the Yellowstone hotspot track migration. The present deep mantle Yellowstone slow anomaly originated at shallower depths (i.e. transition zone), and was then translated down to the lower mantle accompanying the sinking fast anomalies. The temporal evolution of the slow anomalies suggests that the deep Yellowstone slow anomaly could also have originated from the oceanic asthenosphere. Thus, our model provides an alternative explanation for the Yellowstone slow seismic anomalies.