The Reunion hot spot has been active over at least the past 70 M.y. and has left its mark on the Indian and African tectonic plates of the Indian Ocean. On the African plate, the Mascarene ridge is coincident with a significant positive geoid anomaly, similar to the Hawaiian swell, indicating that the apparent compensation of the topographic load is deep in the lithosphere or asthenosphere. Utilizing a French research vessel based in the Indian Ocean, the PI will make appropriate heat flow measurements to determine the extent to which the deep compensation may be explained by a static thermal anomaly, or whether it is primarily dynamic support as a result of active mantle convection, as the Hawaiian hot spot now appears. The heat flow and other geophysical fields will be modeled with numerical methods.
