Heat?Blanketed Convection and its Implications for the Continental Lithosphere

Ancient lithosphere: its role in young continental volcanism.

Imag(in)ing the continental lithosphere

This paper is primarily concerned with seismically imaging details in the mantle at an intermediate scale length between the large scales of regional and global tomography and the small scales of reflection profiles and outcrops. This range is roughly 0.1– 1 kmbab10–10 km, where a is the scale. We consider the implications of several models for mantle evolution in a convecting mantle, and possi...

Marginal stability of thick continental lithosphere

[1] Laboratory and numerical experiments show that when a chemically different layer overlies a hotter but otherwise denser layer, analogous to continental mantle lithosphere over asthenosphere, convective stability depends strongly on both the critical Rayleigh number and the buoyancy number, B, of the lithosphere-like layer. Sufficient cooling at low buoyancy number results in an oscillatory ...

Convection Beneath Young Oceanic Lithosphere: Implications for Thermal Structure and Gravity

Small-scale convection under the oceanic lithosphere which begins in the first 5 m.y. of cooling can produce a gravity signal with the amplitude and wavelength observed for large areas of the central Pacific and southern Indian oceans using Seasat altimeter data. The trend of the observed anomalies is parallel to the direction of plate motion as might be expected if they were produced by small-...

Magmatic expressions of continental lithosphere removal

Gravitational lithosphere removal in continental interior has been inferred from various observations, including anomalous surface deflections and magmatism. We use numerical models and a simplified theoretical analysis to investigate how lithosphere removal can be recognized in the magmatic record. One style of removal is a Rayleigh-Taylor-type instability, where removal occurs through drippin...