A long-standing question in mantle dynamics concerns the scale of heterogeneity in the mantle. Mantle convection tends to both destroy (through stirring) and create (through melt extraction and subduction) heterogeneity in bulk and trace element composition. Over time, these competing processes create variations in geochemical composition along mid-oceanic ridges and among oceanic islands, spanning a range of scales from extremely long wavelength (for example, the DUPAL anomaly) to very small scale (for example, variations amongst melt inclusions). While geochemical data and seismic observations can be used to constrain the length scales of mantle heterogeneity, dynamical mixing calculations can illustrate the processes and timescales involved in stirring and mixing. At the Summer 2004 CIDER workshop on Relating Geochemical and Seismological Heterogeneity in the Earth's Mantle, an interdisciplinary group evaluated scales of heterogeneity in the Earth's mantle using a combined analysis of geochemical data, seismological data and results of numerical models of mixing. We mined the PetDB database for isotopic data from glass and whole rock analyses for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) and the East Pacific Rise (EPR), projecting them along the ridge length. We examined Sr isotope variability along the East Pacific rise by looking at the difference in Sr ratio between adjacent samples as a function of distance between the samples. The East Pacific Rise exhibits an overall bowl shape of normal MORB characteristics, with higher values in the higher latitudes (there is, however, an unfortunate gap in sampling, roughly 2000 km long). These background characteristics are punctuated with spikes in values at various locations, some, but not all of which are associated with off-axis volcanism. A Lomb-Scargle periodogram for unevenly spaced data was utilized to construct a power spectrum of the scale lengths of heterogeneity along both ridges. Using the same isotopic systems (Sr, Nd and Pb), we correlated isotopic data from oceanic islands and seamounts with geophysical measurements and observations in order to determine whether the mantle source component end-members are related to geophysical structure. For this, data obtained from the GeoROC database and other sources were first carefully examined for consistency and then correlated with recent global upper mantle tomographic models of seismic attenuation and velocity structure. Complementing this approach is a fractal analysis of dynamical models of mantle mixing. A variety of published numerical mixing models show a fractal distribution of heterogeneities, consistent with a marble-cake mantle.
DE: 8121 Dynamics, convection currents and mantle plumes

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