Abstract This award supports a project to understand the geochemical evolution of the Kerguelen plume. Mantle plumes are a major vehicle of heat and mass transfer from the Earth's interior. They are also important geochemical windows through which materials and processes of the Earth's interior can be studied. Among mantle plumes, the Kerguelen plume is distinctive because it has created a long (>120 million year) magmatic record which included the Kerguelen Plateau, one of the largest oceanic plateaus, the Ninetyeast Rdge, a nearly 5000 kilometer linear chain of volcanoes which formed as the Indian Plate moved northward over the plume, and the Kerguelen Archipelago on the Antarctic plate. This island complex, active from about 40 million years ago to the present, is largely composed of a thick (about 3 kilometers) basaltic plateau lava sequence. This project will undertake detailed geochemical studies of the basaltic rocks on the Kerguelen Archipelago as well as mafic and ultramafic xenoliths occurring in the basaltic lavas. This is a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Woods Hole Oceanographic institution and the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. This collaborative research program is divides into two projects: (1) The Basalt Project is a study of lavas forming stratigraphic sequences in the plateau lavas which are the oldest and most voluminous extrusive unit in the archipelago. The temporal variations in lava compositions and isotopic ratios of strontium, neodymium and lead will be used to determine temporal variations in proportions of mantle source components, characteristics of the melting process, magma supply rates and crustal processing history, and to evaluate various models for the geochemical characteristics of the plume. (2) The Xenolith Project is a study of lower crustal and mantle xenoliths. This research will include petrography, major and trace element abundances and isotopic ratios of minerals. Geoch emical results, including geothermometry, geobarometry, and geochronology, will be used to understand provenance of the xenoliths and to infer the geodynamic environments and geochemical processes which existed during the evolution of the plume. These results of this research will better constrain physical models of the evolution of the Kerguelen plume, specifically, and mantle plumes in general.
