Deep Drilling into a Mantle Plume Volcano: The Hawaii Scientific Drilling Project

Abstract

Oceanic volcanoes formed by mantle plumes, such as those of Hawaii and Iceland, strongly influence our views about the deep Earth (Morgan, 1971; Sleep, 2006). These volcanoes are the principal geochemical probe into the deep mantle, a testing ground for understanding mantle convection, plate tectonics and volcanism, and an archive of information on Earth’s magnetic field and lithospheredynamics. Study of the petrology, geochemistry, and structure of oceanic volcanoes has contributed immensely to our present understanding of deep Earth processes, but virtually all of this study has been concentrated on rocks available at the surface. In favorable circumstances, surface exposures penetrate to a depth of a few hundred meters, which is a small fraction of the 10- to 15-kilometer height of Hawaiian volcanoes above the depressed seafloor (Moore, 1987; Watts, 2001).

Keywords

• HSDP