RHUM-RUM (Réunion Hotspot and Upper Mantle - Réunions Unterer Mantel) is a French-German passive seismic experiment designed to image a classical oceanic mantle plume – or lack of plume – from crust to core beneath Réunion Island. The results enable insights into the material and heat flow in the Earth's deep interior and provide a geodynamic context for the still controversially debated deep mantle plumes.

Project details

Modelling the mantle plume underneath Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean is a valuable contribution to the RHUM-RUM project, because the plume in a geodynamic model can be studied in a dynamic context - in contrast to seismic tomography. The present-day model state can be regarded as a "true" prediction for the dynamics in the Earth's interior und can therefore be compared to the seismic results.