Crust where it shouldn’t be

In Down to Earth issue 83 (May 2013), a geological magazine published by Geosupplies of Chapeltown, Sheffield) there is an interesting take on the Indian Ocean discovery recently published, tagged on the end of the news section. It concerns a piece of continental crust centred around the islands of Reunion and Mauritius and it is suspected it is a strip of crust once attached to Madagascar, the Seychelles, and India. What caught my eye was it then said, the discovery added to the growing debate as to the existence of so-called mantle plumes. Even in Iceland, there is now a belief that there was a piece of continental crust beneath oceanic basalts and that this, rather than a mantle plume, is the reason why there is a land mass in the middle of the Atlantic, on top of the mid ocean ridge. Interesting times.