The Canary hotspot revisited: Refutation of the Hawaii paradigm and an alternative, plate-based hypothesis

Abstract

Fifty years after the first modern hypotheses on the origin of the Canary Islands were put forward, a consensus on this topic seems more and more elusive. Earth scientists use increasingly sophisticated methods to refine hypotheses like the mantle plume, but they often acknowledge that the model is plagued with many inconsistencies. This work is centred around four main ideas: 1) To falsify (in the sense of Popper, 1959) the Hawaii paradigm for the Canary Islands, 2) to define this group of islands as a weakened lithospheric intraplate feature, hence introducing a plate-based paradigm, 3) to prove a genetic connection between the Canaries and the Atlas Mountains, and 4) to integrate for the first time the Canary Islands in the Nubia Plate kinematics.