Land Bridges and Oceanic Gateways: the Importance of Large Igneous Provinces in Reconstructing Paleobathymetry

Abstract:

Accurate reconstructions of global and regional paleobathymetry are important for understanding changing patterns of paleo-ocean circulation and climate over geological timescales. Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) have erupted throughout the world’s oceans, creating important bathymetric expressions on the seafloor and temporally exposed land.

Global plate tectonic reconstructions of mid-ocean ridges, LIPs, and plumes have demonstrated that the formation of LIPs repeatedly occur at specific ridge-plume interaction locations over periods of tens of millions of years. Due to the shallow depth of mid-ocean ridges relative to the abyssal plains, the formation of LIPs at these locations increases the likelihood of the creation of sub-aerial regions that exist for millions of years before subsiding. Here, we assess the time-varying size, shape, location and depth of LIPs globally and incorporate them into maps of predicted paleo-bathymetry. We focus on accurate estimation of the paleo-bathymetry of oceanic LIPs by taking into account the temporal plume swell that affects the wider region around each LIP, with a likely significant affect on the surface height of both onshore and offshore regions. We ground truth our estimations using a variety of marine data, particularly results from ocean drilling.

Of particular interest is the present-day southern Indian Ocean (offshore eastern Antarctica) where the Bouvet, Marion and Kerguelen plumes interact with the Southwest Indian mid-ocean ridge. As West Gondwana broke apart, continental Antarctica slowly moved away from this stationary line of ridge-plume interactions, with the newly formed oceanic crust of the southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans overlying these locations instead. Thus, since the Jurassic parts of East Antarctica and the adjacent Atlantic and Indian oceans have been repeatedly affected by the formation of LIPs at ridge-plume interactions, and our results suggest the potential for landbridges or significant islands between Africa, India and Antarctica during the Cretaceous and Cenozoic.