The Azores plume origin of the New England Seamounts chain.

The New England Seamounts chain on the North American Plate is linked to the Azores plume, with its hotspot track shaped mainly by subduction-driven mantle flow rather than plume–plate interaction.

• Why it matters: Uncertainty about the Azores plume source and the New England chain’s evolution limits quantitative reconstructions of plate motion and mantle convection from age-progressive seamount archives.
• What they did: The authors used data-assimilation-based numerical simulations to test whether the New England and Corner Seamounts, the Great Meteor Seamounts, and the Azores archipelago formed from a single plume, allowing two time stages of plume motion.
• The result: The simulations indicate subduction-induced sublithospheric mantle flow dominates volcano distribution and track geometry, while plume–plate interaction mainly affects trans-plate hotspot continuity, providing new constraints on multi-plate mantle-flow reorganization.

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