Enriched mantle generated through persistent convective erosion of continental roots
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The origin of geochemically enriched mantle in the asthenosphere is important to understanding the physical, thermal and chemical evolution of Earth’s interior. While subduction of oceanic sediments and deep mantle plumes have been implicated in this enrichment, they cannot fully explain the observed geochemical trends. Here we use geodynamic models to show that enriched mantle can be liberated from the roots of the subcontinental lithospheric mantle by highly organized convective erosion, a process tied to continental rifting and break-up. We demonstrate that this ‘chain’ of convective instabilities sweeps enriched lithospheric material into the suboceanic asthenosphere, in a predictable and quantifiable manner, over tens of millions of years—potentially faster for denser, removed keels. We test this model using geochemical data from the Indian Ocean Seamount Province, a near-continent site of enriched volcanism with minimal deep mantle plume influence. This region shows a peak in enriched mantle volcanism within 50 million years of break-up followed by a steady decline in enrichment, consistent with model predictions. We propose that persistent and long-distance lateral transport of locally metasomatized, removed keel can explain the billion-year-old enrichments in seamounts and ocean island volcanoes located off fragmented continents. Continental break-up causes a reorganization of shallow mantle dynamics that persists long after rifting, disturbing the geosphere and deep carbon cycle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".