Lesser Antilles slab reconstruction suggests significant northwestwards lateral slab transportation underneath the Caribbean

How the surface plates link to mantle slabs is fundamental for paleo-tectonic reconstructions and has implications on mantle dynamics. Assuming a simplified, vertical sinking slab, many tomography-based studies have vertically projected the surface features into the mantle, arguing for the tectonic explanations of mantle structures or vice versa. In contrast, geodynamic models continue to suggest that slabs can be laterally transported by a few hundred kilometers up to ~6000 km near the core-mantle boundary. The dynamics of mantle slabs remain controversial.

The Caribbean mantle has recently been suggested for vertical slab sinking. However, a vertically sinking slab at a near-stationary eastern Caribbean trench would require slab buckling in the mantle, because at least 1,200 km subduction needs to be accommodated within the upper 660 km mantle. Yet, mantle tomographies show expected (~100 km) slab thickness with limited slab thickening or buckling. With no need for a priori assumption on mantle dynamics, here, we used a slab-unfolding approach to restore and re-interpret the slab structures of the Lesser Antilles slab underneath the Caribbean. Our results show that the slab structure can be alternatively explained with limited intra-plate deformation if the slab was transported northwestward by ~900 km after subduction. Such lateral transportation in the mantle is possibly due to the physical connection with the North American plate, whose northwestward motion since the Eocene has been dragging the slab toward the same direction. We also provided our tectonic explanations on the edges and gaps of the slabs, supporting previous work that pre-existing weak zones and plate boundaries determine the fragmentation of the Lesser Antilles slab. The slab unfolding approach used in this study has the potential to be applied to other subduction zones, with no need for a priori assumption on mantle dynamics (i.e., vertical slab sinking) for future tomography-based analysis.