The IMPULSE research expedition sailed from Hafnarfjörður, Iceland on Sunday 4 August.
The international team are collecting detailed measurements of the seafloor near Iceland to better understand processes operating deep within the ‘Icelandic Mantle Plume’ — a giant fountain of slowly-creeping hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary.
The collaboration is led by the University of Birmingham and involves scientists at Cambridge and Southampton Universities, plus collaborators in USA and Iceland.
PhD students Aisling Dunn, Callum Pearman and Philippa Slay from Cambridge are spending 38 days onboard Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory’s research vessel Marcus G Langseth. Professor Nicky White is the Cambridge-lead on the project.
The team’s investigations target a series of V-shaped ridges on the seafloor south of Iceland, which they hope will give insight into the plume’s changing behaviour through time.
One theory the team are testing is that these features were etched into the seafloor because of temperature fluctuations inside the Iceland plume. It is thought that, with each thermal pulse, the seafloor above the plume swelled and contracted; movements that may, in turn, have shifted deep water currents in the North Atlantic and even had knock-on effects on our climate.
Their results could provide evidence that mantle plumes pulse on a million-year timescale, allowing further investigation of how the convective currents in the mantle influence Earth’s climate over long time scales.
Find out more about the IMPULSE cruise here.
Explore Cambridge Earth Science’s research on the Icelandic Mantle Plume here.