Magmatic underplating in the Canary Archipelago

The location of the Canary Archipelago, at the east edge of the North Atlan tic, a few hundred kilometres from the West African coast. has For years po sed a serious difficulty in understanding the complex interaction between l ong-lasting volcanic activity and one of the oldest seafloor basements (>15 0 Ma) on earth. Many different hypotheses have been proposed in the lost tw o decades to understand the genesis of the Canary Archipelago. There is an increasing acceptance to explain the archipelago as the product of the slow passage of the African plate over a mantle hotspot. In rival tectonic mode ls, stretching and thinning of the lithosphere would determine the islands as independent volcanic blocks. We review recent geophysical and geological evidence supporting a mantle plume origin for the Canary Islands, based on the recognition of crustal thickening by mafic intrusions produced by the interaction between the mantle plume and the old oceanic lithosphere beneat h the Canary Archipelago. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.