Using “Ridge-Spotting” as a Test for Pacific Absolute Plate Motion Models

Abstract:

In the mid-1990s the "hotspotting" technique was developed to assess the internal consistency of Pacific absolute plate motions (APM) models derived from hotspot trails, with the assumption that mantle plumes were fixed. Being a variant of the Hough transform, hotspotting maps a dated location (1-D geometry) on the seafloor to a flow line (2-D geometry). The accumulation of intersections of these flow lines reveals the optimal location of a fixed hotspot, assuming that the plate motion model is correct. It is the optimal exploratory technique for a planet with moving rigid plates over a set of fixed hotspots. However, it seems increasingly unlikely that we live on such a planet. Avoiding hotspots altogether we introduce "ridge-spotting", another promising technique for a planet with moving rigid plates and fixed ridges. Alas, we may not be living on that planet either. Yet, ridges are expected to undergo slow changes (ridge jumps notwithstanding), but that does not necessarily imply that an optimal APM model should minimize the ridge migration speed. In particular, ridges between stationary continental plates and fast-moving oceanic plates will move relatively fast, and an APM model should be expected to reflect this motion. In contrast, ridges that have been "pinned" by large mantle upwellings for considerable periods of time might be expected to favor APM models that minimize ridge migration. Given the long-lived super-plume mantle upwelling in the Equatorial Pacific it seems possible that the East-Pacific Rise may be a candidate for the second scenario, while the Pacific-Antarctic ridge, pushing the Pacific away from a near-stationary Antarctic continent, may be a candidate for the former. We present the ridge-spotting method and test published Pacific APM models using seafloor formed at the two ridges. Preliminary results indicate that ridge-spotting identifies problematic APM models because they imply unreasonable ridge migration. Fixed hotspot APM models, but also recently published moving hotspot models suffer from similar shortcomings by predicting unreasonable rotations for the Farallon-Pacific ridge during the Emperor stage. In contrast, a model based on predicting APM velocities from geodynamic modeling of ridge push and slab pull provides a much more reasonable ridge migration history.