On the Yield Strength of Oceanic Lithosphere

The yield strength of oceanic lithosphere determines the mode of mantle convection in a terrestrial planet, and low-temperature plasticity in olivine aggregates is generally believed to govern the plastic rheology of the stiffest part of lithosphere. Because, so far, proposed flow laws for this mechanism exhibit nontrivial discrepancies, we revisit the recent high-pressure deformation data of Mei et al. (2010) with a comprehensive inversion approach based on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Our inversion results indicate that the uncertainty of the relevant flow law parameters is considerably greater than previously thought. Depending on the choice of flow law parameters, the strength of oceanic lithosphere would vary substantially, carrying different implications for the origin of plate tectonics on Earth. To reduce the flow law ambiguity, we suggest that it is important to establish a theoretical basis for estimating macroscopic stress in high-pressure experiments and also to better utilize marine geophysical observations.