Linking mantle upwelling with the lithosphere descent [corrected] and the Japan Sea evolution: a hypothesis.

ABSTRACT: Recent seismic tomography studies image a low velocity zone (interpreted as a high temperature anomaly) in the mantle beneath the subducting Pacific plate near the Japanese islands at the depth of about 400 km. This thermal feature is rather peculiar in terms of the conventional view of mantle convection and subduction zones. Here we present a dynamic restoration of the thermal state of the mantle beneath this region assimilating geophysical, geodetic, and geological data up to 40 million years. We hypothesise that the hot mantle upwelling beneath the Pacific plate partly penetrated through the subducting plate into the mantle wedge and generated two smaller hot upwellings, which contributed to the rapid subsidence in the basins of the Japan Sea and to back-arc spreading. Another part of t

SUBMITTER: Ismail-Zadeh A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3555085 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature