PREVIOUSLY: I GAVE AN EXTREMELY SIMPLIFIED DESCRIPTION OF A NUMERICAL MODEL I'M WORKING ON
Looking at what some arbitrary plume does with some arbitrary ridge is not very interesting. It is much more interesting to investigate the effects of different properties of the system on what happens. This way, we can look at actual geological evidence and constrain the parameters of a plume-ridge system that might have influenced it.
One such geologic setting is Hawaii. In fact, the strange case of the Hawaii-Emperor Seamount Chain's mysterious bend gave rise to the idea of a plume-ridge interaction and that in turn spurred this project.
If you look at mid-ocean ridges spreading at various rates, the effect on the conduit's motion is noticeable! One important thing I should mention is that I calculated timesteps according to where each ridge was in its migration, not based on the amount of time passed. For example, the 2 cm/yr ridge takes four times as long to move its plates some distances as the 8 cm/yr ridge.
Varying the distance between the plume and the ridge has a more noticeable effect. Closer ridges will be more likely to accrete plume material before the force from the overriding plate has a chance to push material away.
NEXT: PLUMES ARE FICKLE BEASTS