Ok, I got curious, I scanned it, didn't study it. I was pretty close; the paper was talking about the heat being released in a decompression being transferred
(conducted) to the surrounding material, raising the ambient temperature, heating, cooling, melting, reforming like I said until there was a balance of some sort.
The way it was phrased, it would be easy to interpret that decompression causes heat. It doesn't, but the heat (energy) has to go somewhere, so it is 'shared' with the surrounding space or material. As discussed in the paper, it was conduction that transferred the heat to the surrounding rock.
An example would be a plate of Jell-O, sitting on a sheet of ice while sitting in the sun. The Jell-O converts back and forth to solid/liquid as the hot and cold seek a balance. (Yah, mostly it melts, it wasn't a great example.)
If I remember Physics 101 (and numerous fire classes); heat is transferred by (1) direct contact (touching a flame); (2) convection (heating a gas; a house furnace moves warmed air into the room); (3) conduction (movement through a solid; brick ovens) and (4) radiation (movement through space; solar heating the planets).
Time for a snooze, I'm getting too wordy.
Rick
From: Rick Bates
Lin, to the rescue again. :-D Good job!
I'm too pooped to read that tonight. Was I close in my guess?
Rick
PS Scritchies to Sissy Dawg and an ear tickle to Joey Kitteh.
From: Lin Kerns
Here is an excellent explanation for decompression/partial melting:
http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/eens211/earths_interior.htm
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