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Strong plates enhance mantle mixing in early Earth

Agrusta, Roberto; van Hunen, Jeroen; Goes, Saskia

Strong plates enhance mantle mixing in early Earth Thumbnail


Authors

Roberto Agrusta

Saskia Goes



Abstract

In the present-day Earth, some subducting plates (slabs) are flattening above the upper–lower mantle boundary at ~670 km depth, whereas others go through, indicating a mode between layered and whole-mantle convection. Previous models predicted that in a few hundred degree hotter early Earth, convection was likely more layered due to dominant slab stagnation. In self-consistent numerical models where slabs have a plate-like rheology, strong slabs and mobile plate boundaries favour stagnation for old and penetration for young slabs, as observed today. Here we show that such models predict slabs would have penetrated into the lower mantle more easily in a hotter Earth, when a weaker asthenosphere and decreased plate density and strength resulted in subduction almost without trench retreat. Thus, heat and material transport in the Earth’s mantle was more (rather than less) efficient in the past, which better matches the thermal evolution of the Earth.

Citation

Agrusta, R., van Hunen, J., & Goes, S. (2018). Strong plates enhance mantle mixing in early Earth. Nature Communications, 9, Article 2708. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05194-5

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 13, 2018
Online Publication Date Jul 13, 2018
Publication Date Jul 13, 2018
Deposit Date Jun 15, 2018
Publicly Available Date Jun 26, 2018
Journal Nature Communications
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Article Number 2708
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05194-5
Related Public URLs https://drive.google.com/open?id=12kBhVr8v2JcEtKhCMqrhD8clsVUwM8x4

Files

Accepted Journal Article (2.9 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.






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