Heat transport in the Hadean mantle: From heat pipes to plates
Open accessAbstract
Plate tectonics is a unique feature of Earth, and it plays a dominant role in transporting Earth's internally generated heat. It also governs the nature, shape, and the motion of the surface of Earth. The initiation of plate tectonics on Earth has been difficult to establish observationally, and modeling of the plate breaking process has not consistently accounted for the nature of the preplate tectonic Earth. We have performed numerical simulations of heat transport in the preplate tectonic Earth to understand the transition to plate tectonic behavior. This period of time is dominated by volcanic heat transport called the heat pipe mode of planetary cooling. These simulations of Earth's mantle include heat transport by melting and melt segregation (volcanism), Newtonian temperature‐dependent viscosity, and internal heating. We show that when heat pipes are active, the lithosphere thickens and lithospheric isotherms are kept flat by the solidus. Both of these effects act to suppress plate tectonics. As volcanism wanes, conduction begins to control lithospheric thickness, and large slopes arise at the base of the lithosphere. This produces large lithospheric stress and focuses it on the thinner regions of the lithosphere resulting in plate breaking events.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Heat-pipe tectonics is an inherently short-lived form of stagnant-lid tectonics, as repeated eruption of lava and burial of older flows ultimately thickens the crust and so impedes magma ascent to the surface.
“Heat-pipe tectonics is an inherently short-lived form of stagnant-lid tectonics (Stern et al., 2018), as repeated eruption of lava and burial of older flows ultimately thickens the crust and so impedes magma ascent to the surface (Kankanamge and Moore, 2016).”
From Secular change and the onset of plate tectonics on Earth (2020) · cites this paper as Kankanamge and Moore, 2016
The Introduction (page unavailable) says continuous burial of older flows produces a thick, cold lithosphere, supporting the burial-and-thickening part attributed to this paper. It does not say that thickening impedes magma ascent; the Model assumes melt reaches the surface, while Lithospheric Stress links the end of heat-pipe volcanism to declining internal heating. The separately cited description of heat-pipe tectonics as short-lived is not judged here. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 28 · Cited by 40
Research works printed but not linked: 21
- Bercovici, D. (2003), The generation of plate tectonics from mantle convection, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 205(3), 107-121.
- Blichert-Toft, J., and F. Albarède (2008), Hafnium isotopes in Jack Hills zircons and the formation of the Hadean crust, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 265(3), 686-702.
- Fowler, A. (1985), Fast thermoviscous convection, Stud. Appl. Math., 72(3), 189-219.
- Franck, S. (1998), Evolution of the global mean heat flow over 4.6 Gyr, Tectonophysics, 291(1), 9-18.
- Hess, H. H. (1962), History of ocean basins, in Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington, vol. 28, edited by A. E. J. Engel et al., pp. 599-620, GSA, Boulder, Colo.
- Hoffman, P. (1997), Tectonic genealogy of North America, in Earth Structure: An Introduction to Structural Geology and Tectonics, edited by B. A. van der Pluijm and S. Marshak, pp. 459-464, McGraw-Hill, New York.
- Kamber, B. S., M. J. Whitehouse, R. Bolhar, and S. Moorbath (2005), Volcanic resurfacing and the early terrestrial crust: Zircon U-Pb and REE constraints from the Isua Greenstone Belt, southern West Greenland, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 240(2), 276-290.
- Mackwell, S. J., M. E. Zimmerman, D. L. Kohlstedt, and D. S. Scherber (1995), Experimental deformation of dry Columbia diabase: Implications for tectonics on Venus, in Proceedings 35th U. S. Symposium on Rock Mechanics, Reno, Nevada, 5-7 Jun., vol. 35, edited by J. J. K. Daemen and R. A. Schultz, pp. 207-214, A. A. Balkema, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
- Mojzsis, S. J., T. M. Harrison, and R. T. Pidgeon (2001), Oxygen-isotope evidence from ancient zircons for liquid water at the Earth's surface 4,300 Myr ago, Nature, 409(6817), 178-181.
- Moore, W. B., and A. Lenardic (2015), The efficiency of plate tectonics and nonequilibrium dynamical evolution of planetary mantles, Geophys. Res. Lett., 42, 9255-9260, doi:10.1002/2015GL065621. · DOI
- Moresi, L., and V. Solomatov (1998), Mantle convection with a brittle lithosphere: Thoughts on the global tectonic styles of the Earth and Venus, Geophys. J. Int., 133(3), 669-682.
- O'Reilly, T. C., and G. F. Davies (1981), Magma transport of heat on Io: A mechanism allowing a thick lithosphere, Geophys. Res. Lett., 8(4), 313-316.
- Pollack, H. N., S. J. Hurter, and J. R. Johnson (1993), Heat flow from the Earth's interior: Analysis of the global data set, Rev. Geophys., 31(3), 267-280.
- Schubert, G., D. L. Turcotte, and P. Olson (2001), Mantle Convection in the Earth and Planets 2 Volume Set, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York.
- Solomatov, V. (1995), Scaling of temperature-and stress-dependent viscosity convection, Phys. Fluids, 7(2), 266-274.
- Tackley, P. J. (1998), Self-consistent generation of tectonic plates in three-dimensional mantle convection, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 157(1), 9-22.
- Tackley, P. J. (2008), Modelling compressible mantle convection with large viscosity contrasts in a three-dimensional spherical shell using the yin-yang grid, Phys. Earth Planet. Inter., 171(1), 7-18.
- Turcotte, D., and G. Schubert (2002), Geodynamics, 2nd ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U. K. Van Kranendonk, M. J., R. Hugh Smithies, A. H. Hickman, and D. Champion (2007), Review: Secular tectonic evolution of Archean continental crust-Interplay between horizontal and vertical processes in the formation of the Pilbara Craton, Australia, Terra Nova, 19(1), 1-38.
- Veeder, G. J., A. G. Davies, D. L. Matson, T. V. Johnson, D. A. Williams, and J. Radebaugh (2012), Io: Volcanic thermal sources and global heat flow, Icarus, 219, 701-722, doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2012.04.004. · DOI
- Vine, F., and D. Matthews (1963), Magnetic anomalies over oceanic ridges, Nature, 199(489), 947-949.
- Wilson, J. T. (1965), A new class of faults and their bearing on continental drift, Nature, 207(4995), 343-347.
- Authors
- Kankanamge, D. G. J., & Moore, W. B.
- Affiliations
- National Institute of Aerospace (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kankanamge, Duminda G. J.
- Venue
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 2016-04-14
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 3208-3214
- ISSN
- 0094-8276 (ISSN-L)
- 1944-8007
- OpenAlex
- W2341670266
- Cited by
- 40
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 20 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 8.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Geophysical Research Letters (publishedVersion)
- LPI
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (EAR-1246983)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Geophysics › High-pressure geophysics and materials
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Geophysics › Geological and Geochemical Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Astro and Planetary Science
- Keywords
- plate tectonics initiation, heat transport, heat pipes, planetary cooling, lithospheric thickening, solidus, lithospheric stress, melt segregation, lithosphere-mantle coupling, internal heating, temperature-dependent viscosity
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
