Tectonics of the early Earth

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Steve Drury

Tectonics on any rocky planet is an expression of the way heat is transferred from its deep interior to the surface to be lost by radiation to outer space. Radiative heat loss is vastly more efficient than either conduction or convection since the power emitted by a body is proportion to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. Unless it is superheated from outside by its star, a planet cannot stay molten at its surface for long because cooling by radiation releases all of the heat that makes its way to the surface. Any football supporter who has rushed to get a microwaved pie at half time will have learned this quickly: a cool crust can hide a damagingly hot centre.

Thermal power is delivered to a planet's surface by convection deep down and conduction nearer the surface because rocks, both solid and molten, are almost opaque to radiation. The vigour of the outward flow of heat might seem to be related mainly to the amount of internal heat but it is also governed by limits imposed by temperature on the form of convection. Of the Inner Planets only Earth shows surface signs of deep convection in the form of plate tectonics driven mainly by the pull exerted by steep subduction of cool, dense slabs of old oceanic lithosphere. Only Jupiter's moon Io shows comparable surface signs of inner dynamics, but in the form of immense volcanoes rather than lateral movements of slabs. Io has about 40 times the surface heat flow of Earth, thanks largely to huge tidal forces imposed by Jupiter. So it seems that a different mode of convection is needed to shift the tidal heat production; similar in many ways to Earth's relatively puny and isolated hot spots and mantle plumes.

Most of the yellow and orange hues of Io are d...

An analogy for the early Earth, Jupiter's moon Io is speckled with large active volcanoes; signs of vigorous internal heat transport but not of plate tectonics. Its colour is dominated by various forms of sulfur rather than mafic igneous rocks. (credit: Wikipedia)

Shortly after Earth's accretion it would have contained far more heat than now: gravitational energy of accretion itself; greater tidal heating from a close Moon and up to five times more from internal radioactive decay. The time at which plate tectonics can be deduced from evidence in ancient rocks has been disputed since the 1970s, but now an approach inspired by Io's behaviour approaches the issue from the opposite direction: what might have been the mode of Earth's heat transport shortly after accretion (Moore, W.B. & Webb, A.A.G. 2013. Heat-pipe Earth. Nature, v. 501, p. 501-505). The two American geophysicists modelled Rayleigh-Bénard convection – multicelled convection akin to that of the 'heat pipes' inside Io – for a range of possible thermal conditions in the Hadean. The modelled planet, dominated by volcanic centres turned out to have some surprising properties.

The sheer efficiency of heat-pipe dominated heat transfer and radiative heat lost results in development of a thick cold lithosphere between the pipes, that advects surface material downwards. Decreasing the heat sources results in a 'flip' to convection very like plate tectonics. In itself, this notion of sudden shift from Rayleigh-Bénard convection to plate tectonics is not new – several Archaean specialists, including me, debated this in the late 1970s – but the convincing modelling is. The authors also assemble a plausible list of evidence for it from the Archaean geological record: the presence in pre- 3.2 Ga greenstone belts of abundant ultramafic lavas marking high fractions of mantle melting; the dome-trough structure of granite-greenstone terrains; granitic magmas formed by melting of wet mafic rocks at around 45 km depth, extending back to second-hand evidence from Hadean zircons preserved in much younger rocks. They dwell on the oldest sizeable terranes in West Greenland (the Itsaq gneiss complex), South Africa and Western Australia (Barberton and the Pilbara) as a plausible and tangible products of 'heat-pipe' tectonics. They suggest that the transition to plate-tectonic dominance was around 3.2 Ga, yet 'heat pipes' remain to the present in the form of plumes so nicely defined in the preceding item Mantle structures beneath the central Pacific.

Was Ancient Earth Like Jupiter's Super-Volcanic Moon Io? (space

http://earth-pages.co.uk/2013/10/08/tectonics-of-the-early-earth/
--