The chemical structure of the Hawaiian mantle plume

The Hawaiian–Emperor volcanic island and seamount chain is usually attributed to a hot mantle plume, located beneath the Pacific lithosphere, that delivers material sourced from deep in the mantle to the surface1,2,3,4,5. The shield volcanoes of the Hawaiian islands are distributed in two curvilinear, parallel trends (termed ‘Kea’ and ‘Loa’), whose rocks are characterized by general geochemical differences2,3,4,5. This has led to the proposition that Hawaiian volcanoes sample compositionally distinct, concentrically zoned, regions of the underlying mantle plume4,5. Melt inclusions, or samples of local magma ‘frozen’ in olivine phenocrysts during crystallization, may record complexities of mantle sources6, thereby providing better insight into the chemical structure of plumes. Here we report the discovery of both Kea- and Loa-like major and trace element compositions in olivine-hosted melt inclusions in individual, shield-stage Hawaiian volcanoes—even within single rock samples. We infer from these data that one mantle source component may dominate a single lava flow, but that the two mantle source components are consistently represented to some extent in all lavas, regardless of the specific geographic location of the volcano. We therefore suggest that the Hawaiian mantle plume is unlikely to be compositionally concentrically zoned. Instead, the observed chemical variation is probably controlled by the thermal structure of the plume.