Excess magmatism is a common occurrence near areas of tectonic rifting, but a region off the coast of Norway was found to have a much greater degree of magmatism than typical circumstance permits. To investigate the cause of this excess magmatism, the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) launched Expedition 396 to take drill core samples from ocean floor basalts that erupted about 56 million years ago. There are three leading hypotheses for the source of excess magmatism in the Northern Atlantic: a thermal anomaly caused by an interaction with the Icelandic mantle plume, small-scale convection at the base of the lithosphere, heterogeneities in the mantle source, or a combination of all three. Through the use of thermobarometry (Lee et al. 2009), we have determined that a thermal anomaly was present at the time of emplacement. However, it is not the sole contributor to the sheer amount of erupted material present. As such, we have begun our investigation into the other two hypotheses by modifying the excel software package Melt-PX (Lambart et al. 2016) to model an active upwelling region and analyzing samples to determine what role convection and composition play in this system. References:
Lambart, S., Baker, M. B., Stolper, E. M., (2016). The role of pyroxenite in basalt genesis: Melt‐PX, a melting parameterization for mantle pyroxenites between 0.9 and 5 GPa: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 121(8), 5708-5735. doi: 10.1002/ 2015JB012762. Lee, C., Luffi, P., Plank, T., Dalton, H., Leeman, W. (2009). Constraints on the depths and temperatures of basaltic magma generation on Earth and other terrestrial planets using new thermobarometers for mafic magmas. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 279(1-2), 20-33. 10.1016/j.epsl.2008.12.020