Seamounts, knolls and petit-spot monogenetic volcanoes on the subducting Pacific Plate

摘要

On the western part of the Pacific Plate most seamounts formed during the Cretaceous period in the so-called West Pacific Seamount Province (WPSP). On the northwestern part of the same plate, the Joban and Japanese Seamount Trail (JJST) are also composed of Early Cretaceous seamounts. However, two new groups of knolls were recently discovered during multibeam surveys on the Pacific Plate along the Japan Trench. One group consists of circular knolls that are flat-topped in shape and correspond to eruptive ages of approximately 75 Ma. The other group consists of irregularly shaped knolls, also called petit-spot volcanoes, that are found on the outer-rise systems of the subducting Pacific Plate. These petit-spots seem much younger and available age data suggest that they only formed in the last few million years. Acoustic reflective data, which are simultaneously obtained with bathymetrical data, are a most powerful tool to distinguish the petit-spots from the Cretaceous edifices in the WPSP and JJST. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory search for these new kind of petit-spot volcanoes along the trenches in the Pacific Ocean, with an emphasis on the Japan and Tonga trenches. The sizes of these irregularly shaped petit-spot volcanoes are several orders of magnitude less than the Cretaceous seamounts and circular knolls, yet they appear to be ubiquitous on the ocean floor, in particular, where incipient melts in the asthenosphere can be squeezed out by tectonic forces.