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      Superplume mantle tracked isotopically the length of Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea

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          Abstract

          Seismological findings show a complex scenario of plume upwellings from a deep thermo-chemical anomaly (superplume) beneath the East African Rift System (EARS). It is unclear if these geophysical observations represent a true picture of the superplume and its influence on magmatism along the EARS. Thus, it is essential to find a geochemical tracer to establish where upwellings are connected to the deep-seated thermo-chemical anomaly. Here we identify a unique non-volatile superplume isotopic signature (‘C’) in the youngest (after 10 Ma) phase of widespread EARS rift-related magmatism where it extends into the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. This is the first sound evidence that the superplume influences the EARS far from the low seismic velocities in the magma-rich northern half. Our finding shows for the first time that superplume mantle exists beneath the rift the length of Africa from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean offshore southern Mozambique.

          Abstract

          Low seismic velocity anomalies reveal a complex scenario of plume upwellings from a deep thermo-chemical anomaly (superplume) in the mantle below the East African Rift, however, geophysical observations alone are insufficient to identify the extent of plume influence on the magmatism along the rift. Here, the authors use Sr-Nd-Pb isotope data to show that superplume mantle underlies the entire rift system, from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean south of Mozambique.

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          A Chemical Classification of Volcanic Rocks Based on the Total Alkali-Silica Diagram

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            Synchronizing rock clocks of Earth history.

            Calibration of the geological time scale is achieved by independent radioisotopic and astronomical dating, but these techniques yield discrepancies of approximately 1.0% or more, limiting our ability to reconstruct Earth history. To overcome this fundamental setback, we compared astronomical and 40Ar/39Ar ages of tephras in marine deposits in Morocco to calibrate the age of Fish Canyon sanidine, the most widely used standard in 40Ar/39Ar geochronology. This calibration results in a more precise older age of 28.201 +/- 0.046 million years ago (Ma) and reduces the 40Ar/39Ar method's absolute uncertainty from approximately 2.5 to 0.25%. In addition, this calibration provides tight constraints for the astronomical tuning of pre-Neogene successions, resulting in a mutually consistent age of approximately 65.95 Ma for the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary.
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              S40RTS: a degree-40 shear-velocity model for the mantle from new Rayleigh wave dispersion, teleseismic traveltime and normal-mode splitting function measurements

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                j.m.oconnor@vu.nl
                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2041-1723
                2 December 2019
                2 December 2019
                2019
                : 10
                : 5493
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 1033 7684, GRID grid.10894.34, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, ; Am Handelshafen 12, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2107 3311, GRID grid.5330.5, GeoZentrum Nordbayern, , Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, ; Schlossgarten 5, 91054 Erlangen, Germany
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1754 9227, GRID grid.12380.38, Faculty of Science, , Vrije University Amsterdam, ; De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands
                [4 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2297 4381, GRID grid.7704.4, University of Bremen, ; Fachbereich 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
                [5 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2112 1969, GRID grid.4391.f, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, , Oregon State University, ; Corvallis, OR 97331-5503 USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0153-5504
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7793-5854
                Article
                13181
                10.1038/s41467-019-13181-7
                6889401
                0bda3f44-aa9f-4d52-91a3-a5428a99c8fd
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 28 May 2018
                : 25 October 2019
                Funding
                Funded by: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, 03G0230A) and by AWI internal funding.
                Categories
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                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Uncategorized
                geochemistry,geophysics,tectonics
                Uncategorized
                geochemistry, geophysics, tectonics

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