Publication

1998-12

English

http://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/1998/publication-450.pdf (0.17 Mo)

1998 Nature Publishing Group

Aslanian Daniel, Geli Louis, Olivet Jean-Louis

Nature (Nature), 1998-12 , Vol. 396 , N. 6707 , P. 127-127

Geology

Chain, Pacific, Islands, Volcanism

In may 1997, Nature published an article by Wessel and Kroenke1 presenting an ageindependent geometric technique which was supposed to "refine absolute plate motions" and "relocate extinct hotpsots". According to the authors, this technique has the potential to estimate the pseudo-age for all seamounts in a seamount chain and link cogenetic seamounts produced by hotspot ; in addition, they claim that its application points to a recent change in the Pacific Plate motion and relocates the Louisville hotspot to the Hollister ridge, south of Eltanin FZ. Three months later, the same authors proposed to Geophysical Research Letters a note2 (published in february 1998) based on the analysis of synthetic and actual seamount data, showing that the interpretation of raw images computed by their technique is not straigthforward. This note however does not explicitely point out all the insufficiencies of the method and does not cast doubt on the conclusions resulting from its application. A careful "non-blind" examination of this technique shows that it cannot be used in practise without age information and so, it does not present any progress relative to the classical backtracking method ; in addition, the practical conclusions (such as the location of the Louisville hotpsot) are not correct3,4