An emerging plume head interacting with the Hawaiian plume tail

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

The Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain has shown two subparallel geographical and geochemical volcanic trends, Loa and Kea, since ～5 Ma, for which numerous models have been proposed that usually involve a single mantle plume sampling different compositional sources of the deep or shallow mantle. However, both the dramatically increased eruption rate of the Hawaiian hotspot since ～5 Ma and the nearly simultaneous southward bending of the Hawaiian chain remain unexplained. Here, we propose a plume-plume interaction model where the compositionally depleted Kea trend represents the original Hawaiian plume tail and the relatively enriched Loa trend represents an emerging plume head southeast of the Hawaiian plume tail.