Anomalously high heat flow regions beneath the Transantarctic Mountains
and Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica inferred from Curie depth
Abstract
The Transantarctic Mountains (TAM) separate the warmer lithosphere of
the West Antarctic rift system and the colder East Antarctic craton. Low
velocity zones beneath the TAM imaged in recent seismological studies
have been interpreted as warm low-density mantle material, suggesting a
strong contribution of thermal support to the uplift of the TAM. We
present new Curie Depth Point (CDP) and geothermal heat flow (GHF) maps
of the northern TAM and adjacent Wilkes Subglacial Basin (WSB) based on
high resolution magnetic airborne measurements. We find shallow CDP and
high GHF, beneath the northern TAM reinforcing the idea of thermal
support of the topography of the mountain range. Additionally, locally
high GHF is observed in the Central Basin of the WSB and the Rennick
Graben, which has not been resolved previously, while the broader WSB
show lower GHF. Across the study area the GHF values range from 30 to
110 mW/m2. Lastly, we compare our CDP estimates to
recent Moho depth estimates and our GHF estimates to sparse in situ GHF
measurements as well as to existing continent-wide GHF estimates, which
shows closed agreement to previous seismic estimates.