Cores recovered on Deep Sea Drilling Program leg 43 and on Bermuda itself, together with geophysical data (anomalies in basement depth, geoid, and heatflow) and modeling have long suggested that the uplift forming the Bermuda Rise, as well as the initial igneous activity that produced the Bermuda volcanoes, began ca. 47–40 Ma, during the early to middle part of the Middle Eocene. Some authors attribute 65 Ma igneous activity in Mississippi and 115 Ma activity in Kansas to a putative “Bermuda hotspot” or plume fixed in the mantle below a moving North America plate. While this is more or less...