Overview
- The Nature Geoscience paper describes a slow convective “mantle wave” at 150–200 km depth that strips material from the roots of continents.
- Detached fragments are transported laterally for more than 1,000 km into the oceanic mantle, producing enriched magmas that can persist for tens of millions of years.
- Coupled simulations and isotopic data, including from the Indian Ocean Seamount Province, match a post‑Gondwana burst of enriched melts that faded over time.
- The mechanism accounts for continental-like chemical signatures at mid-ocean islands without invoking a deep mantle plume in those cases, though plumes are not ruled out elsewhere.
- The study was led by the University of Southampton with partners in Potsdam, Canada and the UK, and the authors call for further sampling to test how widespread the process is.