Relationship between Hotspots and Mantle Structure: Correlation with Whole Mantle Seismic Tomography

Abstract

We examine the relation between the locations of hotspots on the surface of the Earth and mantle structure as it appears from seismic tomography. In particular, we correlated the hotspots field with Tanimoto's 1989 shear wave velocity structure throughout the mantle, which is represented in spherical harmonics. A spherical harmonics representation of both fields enables us to perform a "degree by degree" correlation, and so to test the possible relations between features of the same scale in them. A statistical significance analysis is applied to these results. A similar analysis was performed by Richards, Hager and Sleep (1988) in studying the hotspots-geoid relations.

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