Related papers: Tectonics controls hydration-induced rheological h…
The oceanic mantle lithosphere has considerable potential to store chemically bound water, thereby being an important factor for the deep water cycle. However, the actual extent of hydrous alteration in such mantle rocks is debated.…
Abyssal hills, arguably the most extensive coherent pattern in Earth's surface topography, record the spacing of normal faults formed at mid-ocean ridges. At fast-spreading ridges, high-resolution bathymetry shows a pronounced spectral peak…
Turbulent water motions are important for the exchange of momentum, heat, nutrients, and suspended matter including sediments in the deep-sea that is generally stably stratified in density. To maintain ocean-density stratification, an…
Plate tectonics is a geophysical process currently unique to Earth, has an important role in regulating the Earth's climate, and may be better understood by identifying rocky planets outside our solar system with tectonic activity. The key…
To explain Venus' young surface age and lack of plate tectonics, Venus' tectonic regime has often been proposed to be either an episodic-lid regime with global lithospheric overturns, or an equilibrium resurfacing regime with numerous…
Tectonic deformation crucially shapes the Earth's surface, with strain localization resulting in the formation of shear zones and faults that accommodate significant tectonic displacement. Earthquake dynamic rupture models, which provide…
Growing evidence is found in observations and numerical modelling of the importance of steep seafloor topography for turbulent diapycnal mixing leading to redistribution of suspended matter and nutrients, especially in waters with abundant…
Changes in the strength of the thermohaline overturning circulation are associated, by geostrophy, with changes in the east-west pressure difference across an ocean basin. The tropical-polar density contrast and the east-west pressure…
The effects of the hydration mechanism on continental crust recycling are analyzed through a 2D finite element thermo-mechanical model. Oceanic slab dehydration and consequent mantle wedge hydration are implemented using a dynamic method.…
Aims: The long-term carbon cycle for planets with a surface entirely covered by oceans works differently from that of the present-day Earth because inefficient erosion leads to a strong dependence of the weathering rate on the rate of…
The scaling of plate-tectonic convection is investigated by simulating thermal convection with pseudoplastic rheology and strongly temperature-dependent viscosity. The effect of mantle melting is also explored with additional…
Topography on a wet rocky exoplanet could raise land above its sea level. Although land elevation is the product of many complex processes, the large-scale topographic features on any geodynamically-active planet are the expression of the…
Past efforts to interrogate the mantle's contribution to Earth's topography suffer from inadequate in-situ measurements of true bathymetry and the involvement of an empirical plate model whose presumed lithospheric density profile…
The tectonic regime of rocky planets fundamentally influences their long-term evolution and cycling of volatiles between interior and atmosphere. Earth is the only known planet with active plate tectonics, but observations of exoplanets may…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
The roughness of the subduction interface is thought to influence seismogenic behavior in subduction zones, but a detailed understanding of how such roughness affects the state of stress along the subduction megathrust is still debated.…
The long-term carbon cycle is vital for maintaining liquid water oceans on rocky planets due to the negative climate feedbacks involved in silicate weathering. Plate tectonics plays a crucial role in driving the long-term carbon cycle…
Soft or Deformable Plate Tectonics in the sphere must follow geometric rules inferred from the orthographic projection. An analytic equivalent of this geometry can be derived by the application of Potential Field Methods in the case of…
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…
Recent insights to melt migration beneath ridges suggest that channelized flow is a consequence of melting of a heterogeneous mantle, and that spreading rate modulates the dynamics of the localized flow. A corollary of this finding is that…