Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
May 2004
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusm.v12b..01l&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #V12B-01
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
8120 Dynamics Of Lithosphere And Mantle: General, 8125 Evolution Of The Earth
Scientific paper
The Archean mantle was undoubtedly hotter, on average, than the mantle of today because it contained about three times the present day concentration of heat-producing elements. Actual temperatures are hard to calculate, because they depend on how efficiently the mantle lost heat, and that depends on the style of tectonics. Plate tectonics is an efficient heat-loss mechanism, involving as it does the foundering of the entire, cold oceanic lithosphere deep into the mantle, but could it have operated in the Archean? The problem is that a hotter mantle implies that the oceanic crust produced at mid-ocean ridges would be thicker and more buoyant: too buoyant to want to subduct when it reached its designated subduction zone. There are various possibilities: the Earth may have developed a buoyant, stagnant shell - similar to a model for Venus - which was periodically catastrophically resurfaced; there may have been inefficient subduction of the mantle lithosphere combined with efficient episodic subduction of massive piles of scraped-off oceanic crust; or there may have been more present-day style plate tectonics, involving "flat" subduction of the oceanic lithosphere and delayed sinking into the deep mantle. Episodic overturning between the upper and lower mantle ("MOM" events) may have led to bursts of tectonic activity in any of the scenarios above.
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