Preservation of ancient and fertile lithospheric mantle beneath the southwestern United States

Stable continental regions, free from tectonic activity, are generally found only within ancient cratons—the centres of continents which formed in the Archaean era, 4.0–2.5 Gyr ago. But in the Cordilleran mountain belt of western North America some younger (middle Proterozoic) regions have remained stable1,2, whereas some older (late Archaean) regions have been tectonically disturbed1,3, suggesting that age alone does not determine lithospheric strength and crustal stability. Here we report rhenium–osmium isotope and mineral compositions of peridotite xenoliths from two regions of the Cordilleran mountain belt. We found that the younger, undeformed Colorado plateau is underlain by lithospheric mantle that is ‘depleted’ (deficient in minerals extracted by partial melting of the rock), whereas the older (Archaean), yet deformed, southern Basin and Range province is underlain by ‘fertile’ lithospheric mantle (not depleted by melt extraction). We suggest that the apparent relationship between composition and lithospheric strength, inferred from different degrees of crustal deformation, occurs because depleted mantle is intrinsically less dense than fertile mantle (due to iron having been lost when melt was extracted from the rock). This allows the depleted mantle to form a thicker thermal boundary layer4 between the deep convecting mantle and the crust, thus reducing tectonic activity at the surface. The inference that not all Archaean crust developed a strong and thick thermal boundary layer leads to the possibility that such ancient crust may have been overlooked because of its intensive reworking or lost from the geological record owing to preferential recycling.