Is Iceland an example of a hot-spot overlying a mantle plume? Iceland has been cited as the location of a hot-spot overlying a mantle plume (similar to that of the Hawaii chain in the Pacific), though for some time this model has been challenged (see Gillian Foulger's mantle plumes site, especially Lundin &amp; Doré's article).

How does the recent announcement by Torsvik et al. (2015) — that south east Iceland is underlain by continental crust — affect this debate?

Reference


Torsvik, TH, et al. (2015), PNAS online 30 March 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1423099112
Yes, Iceland is an example of a hotspot overlying a plume. The plume has been imaged seismically, e.g., see the Science paper (Figure 3) by Montelli et al. (2004). It is available at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/303/5656/338

The 2015 paper you referred doesn't dispute that claim. All is says is that "The plume split off a sliver of continent from Greenland in the Early Eocene. This sliver is now located beneath southeast Iceland where it locally contaminates some of the plume-derived magmas".