Earth-Pages Archive News, Tectonics

One of the elements comprising the canon of plate tectonics is that as plates spread away from constructive margins the depth to the ocean floor increases in direct proportion to the square root of the underling lithosphere's age. This is generally considered to reflect steady passive cooling and increasing density of initially hot lithosphere produced at ridge systems. The resulting slope of the ocean floor is said to result in one of the gravitational forces that sustain plate tectonics - 'ridge slide'. The Pacific Ocean floor is a good test for the hypothesis, but unfortunately does not show a linear depth vs √age relationship (Adam, C. & Vidal, V. 2010. Mantle flow drives the subsidence of oceanic plates. Science, v. 328, p. 83-85). Instead, the ocean floor flattens out beyond a threshold distance, which has been a source of puzzlement for decades. However, a plot of depth against the square root of distance from the ridge along estimated lines of mantle convective flow is consistently linear. The depth curve seems therefore to reflect past changes in the direction of sea-floor spreading and changes in the deeper mantle convection, thereby linking reality to the original model for continental drift that had mantle convection at its heart. That view was discarded by geophysicists on account of a widespread belief that the asthenosphere was too weak to transmit forces from below to the rigid lithospheric plates.

Joining the Neoproterozoic dots

Riven by the effects of at least two Wilson cycles of rifting drifting and collision, and then covered by a variety of later sediments, late-Precambrian rocks at high latitudes around today’s North Atlantic are nowhere near as coherent as their counterparts in, for instance, Africa. Also they have a long history of field investigation that began long before the unifying theory of plate tectonics, using a parochial rather than a ‘joined-up’ approach. Consequently there is a vast literature, as witness that of say the Moines or the Dalradian in Scotland, which has strangely acted as a hindrance rather than a boon to synthesisers: not that attempts haven’t been made in recent decades. Interestingly, a multi-hemisphere approach to unification, combining Australian and British geologists, seems to have made a great deal of ground (Cawood, P.A. et al. 2010. Neoproterozoic orogeny along the margin of Rodinia: Valhalla orogen, North Atlantic. Geology, v. 38, p. 99-102).

The Rodinia (‘Motherland’) supercontinent united all continental lithosphere at the end of the Mesoproterozoic era, existed between 1100 and 750 Ma, then broke into eight drifting continents during the Neoproterozoic. Like the later Pangaea (‘all of mother Earth’) formed when all these wandering masses finally clanged together again, conditions deep in the interior of Rodinia were probably tectonically and geomorphologically almost static. All the action would have been around its rim, towards which much of global sea-floor spreading ultimately was directed. Far older continental material now juxtaposed across the high-latitude North Atlantic was in just such an exposed position at the edge of the supercontinent; Greenland abutting the present Baltic crystalline mass. Local sea-floor spreading twisted Baltica from this part of Rodinia in a clockwise manner, to leave a large triangular sea in its wake. This Asgard Sea (why not Toblerone?) received debris from uplifted masses of older crust, to fill a deep sedimentary basin ready for deformation should tectonics warrant that. Two such episodes (980-910, 830-710 Ma) created the older Neoproterozoic metamorphic belts which have long drawn geologists to study Greenland, Scotland and Scandinavia in great detail: for British geologists the attraction was the complexity of the Moine Schists in which John Ramsay famously laid the foundations of modern polyphase structural analysis in the late 1950s and 1960s. A noteworthy point is that by comparison with most mountain belts, the Valhalla orogen took an awfully long time to form: around 300 Ma.

An old theory resurrected

Before the wide acceptance of sea-floor spreading and continental drift geoscientists had to seek explanations for the common occurrence of very similar fossils on now widely separated land masses. On the other hand, Alfred Wegener used observations such as the presence of fossilised tongue-like Glossopteris leaves in the Permian sediments of all the southern continents, and similar distributions of reptiles to support his theory. His detractors tried to explain away the fossil evidence by suggesting now-vanished land bridges, ‘island hopping’, floating seeds, and natural Noah’s Arks carrying animals and so on. With the discovery of irrefutable evidence for sea-floor spreading Wegener was vindicated, albeit long after his death, and the views of his detractors became ridiculed and neglected in their turn. But one puzzle remained: the fauna of Madagascar. Beginning about 170 Ma ago, Madagascar along with India parted company with Africa, to the extent that Madagascar is now more than 430 km off the East African coast (India moved much further independently).

Madagascar, of course, is famous for its lemurs but its fauna includes other animals found nowhere else. Another oddity is that late-Mesozoic Malagasy sediments have yielded no evidence for ancestors to these animals, so the fauna could not have evolved from African stock set adrift with the microcontinent. The only explanation then seems to be that the little animal ancestors drifted on vegetation rafts from Africa – note this would be more unlikely for large animals. Yet today’s current patterns make any drift toward Madagascar highly unlikely. The puzzle may have been resolved, if one believes computer modelling, by the different surface flow patterns of the Indian Ocean during the Palaeocene (Ali, J.R. & Huber, M. 2010. Mammalian biodiversity on Madagascar controlled by ocean currents. Nature, v. 463, p. 653-656). At that time the drifting island was further south than it is now, and currents would intermittently have flowed from East Africa towards it. As it was driven northwards, so it entered the influence of the westward flowing, South Equatorial Current that now isolates it from its parent continent. The idea of rafting, first developed in 1940 by George Gaylord Simpson, an opponent of anything smacking of continental drift, also seems the only possibility if the arrival of New World monkeys in South America and other oddities are to be explained.

See also: Krause, D.W. 2010. Washed up in Madagascar. Nature, v. 463, p. 613-614.

Dating subduction

The most distinctive products of the high-pressure, low-temperature metamorphism along subduction zones are stunningly coloured blueschists formed from ocean-floor basalts, their colour deriving from the sodium-rich amphibole glaucophane. Yet the defining mineral for subduction-zone metamorphism is lawsonite, which takes up the calcium from plagioclase feldspar that becomes unstable. Having formed at depths of up to 100 km, blueschists found at the surface had to rise slowly from mantle depths after metamorphism. Consequently, it is nearly impossible to unravel the date of their formation from those of later events. Being basaltic, blueschists also lack the usual elements whose unstable isotopes are commonly used for radiometric dating: potassium, rubidium, uranium and thorium. However, they do contain rare-earth elements, an isotope of one (¹⁷⁶Lu) being unstable. Applying the Lu-Hf dating method to lawsonite ties down precisely when basalts achieved the narrow P-T range at which lawsonite forms (Mulcahy, S.R. et al. 2009. Lawsonite Lu-Hf geochronology: A new geochronometer for subduction zone processes. Geology, v. 37, p. 987-990). Sean Mulcahy of the Unigversity of Nevada and colleagues from Washington State chose a sample from the type locality for lawsonite discovered in the late 19th century by Andrew Lawson: the Franciscan blueschists of the Tiburon Peninsula in California. The Franciscan Complex formed during subduction at 145.5 Ma.

Phew, there is a mantle plume under Hawaii after all

Along with constructive and destructive plate boundaries volcanic hotspots within plates and sometimes at plate boundaries epitomise modern Earth science. Assuming that they are fixed points of reference allows the absolute motions of tectonic plates to be worked out, although it seems that some do move around. The evidence for hotspots being fixed or at least moving much more slowly than do plates are the chains of extinct volcanic islands or seamounts that extend away from active volcanic centres in the direction of plate motion. The most debated aspect of hotspots is whether they stem from processes in the upper mantle just beneath the asthenosphere or are the heads of cylindrical plumes of hot mantle that rise from the region next to the outer core. Seismic tomography has been claimed capable of resolving between the two possibilities, but its spatial resolution depends very much on the spacing of seismometers that provide the data that tomography subjects to highly complex processing. Some have claimed that the resolution of early tomography lends itself to producing artefacts that look like sought-after mantle structures (see Geoscience consensus challenged in EPN of December 2003).

One hotspot that has all the characteristics of a plume head, but which seismic tomography has been unable to detect is the volcanically active Big Island of the Hawaiian chain. The response to that somewhat embarrassing failure has been to deploy 30-odd seismometers on the seabed immediately around Hawaii and then to shift them to a wider spacing further from the island between 2005 to 2007. Together with 10 stations on the islands themselves, the array recorded 2146 S-wave arrivals from 97 earthquakes (Wolfe, C.J. et al. 2009. Mantle shear-wave velocity structure beneath the Hawaiian hot spot. Science, v. 326, p. 1388-1390). The results are reassuring, for the show in detail that indeed there is a vertical zone of low S-wave speeds indicating hotter, less rigid mantle that extends down to at least 1200 km. It is several hundred kilometres across, and is indeed a plume surrounded by a ‘tube’ of colder more rigid mantle.

See also: Kerr, R.A. 2009. Sea-floor study gives plumes from the deep mantle a boost. Science, v. 326, p. 1330.

Hot tectonics in the Archaean

The first thing that strikes you when looking at a small-scale geological maps of many deformed Archaean terrains – most of them are deformed – is how different they seem compared with those of later aeons. Bulbous granitic plutons separate slim and irregular, sometimes cusp-adorned areas of volcanic and sedimentary rocks. This is classic granite-greenstone terrain. Many geologists who have worked on Archaean rocks find it hard to pin down signs of ‘modern’ plate tectonics and the typical orogens of continent-continent collision zones, yet non-uniformitarian ideas on Archaean tectonics have become passé in the last 25-30 years. That seems odd, considering that the Earth’s internal heat production by radioactive decay must have been higher as less radioactive U, Th and K isotopes would have decayed in the very distant past. Convective mantle flow would have been faster, lithosphere would not have been so thick as now, and plates would have moved more rapidly in order that radioactive heat and that left over from early accretion and the Moon-forming event could escape. Whichever way one looks at such a scenario – plates as big as modern ones or more small plates – there is no escaping that younger, warmer lithosphere would have re-entered the mantle. Geochemistry of Archaean granitic rocks is so different from those of later aeons that their formative processes must have differed too. Quite probably descending basaltic crust would not have dehydrated to produce eclogite under low-T, high-P conditions, and that would prevent steep subduction, so that slab-pull may not have been the driving force for Archaean tectonics.

Two recent papers refresh the idea that the present is not entirely a key to the Earth’s Archaean past. One suggests an entirely alien kind of orogenic activity: that of very hot deformation of weak lithosphere (Chardon, D. et al. 2009. Flow of ultra-hot orogens: A view from the Precambrian, clues for the Phanerozoic. Tectonophysics, v. 477, p. 105-108). Dominique Chardon of the Université de Toulouse and colleagues from the Université de Rennes, highlight the dominance in orogens of the Archaean and early Proterozoic of ductile deformation imposed on massive accretion of magma produced by mantle processes, compared with the dominantly brittle style that dominates modern, cold orogens. Accumulated radiometric dating of the main building material of the continents – diorites and grandiorites – indicates that the 1.5 Ga of the Archaean witnessed the formation of not only the earliest continental crust but most (65%) of the rest of it. A summary of an emerging explanation for explosive continent production appeared in the first 2010 issue of Scientific American (Simpson, S. 2009. Violent origins of continents. Scientific American v. 302(1), p. 46-53). This rests on rapidly growing evidence, much unearthed by Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University, for the influence of major impacts that flung debris far and wide and perturbed the mantle’s thermal structure on a massive scale (Glikson, A. 2008. Field evidence for Eros-scale asteroids and impact forcing of Precambrian geodynamic episodes, Kaapvaal (south Africa) and Pilbara (Western Australia) cratons. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 267, p. 558-570). Beds of impact-related spherules are turning up throughout Archaean greenstone-belt sequences. There are also megabreccias that could be debris lifted by tsunamis vcaused by impacts in the Archaean oceans. Glikson has demonstrated that the timing of such evidence closely matches that of magmatic outbursts that created continental crust. He has proposed that the thermal effects of the large impacts set in motion or deflected a large number of convective mantle plumes that drove the necessary magmatism.

Evidence for Hadean continental crust takes a knock

The pre-4 Ga ages recorded by some of the detrital zircons from the 3 Ga Jack Hills sandstones have been used to suggest that continental crust formed from about 4.4 Ga onwards, which implies some kind of recycling process in the tectonics of the early earth to generate and fractionate the necessary silicic magmas. That assumes zircons only form in silicic magmas produced by fractionation in volcanic arcs. The plagiogranites found in small amounts in ophiolites also contain zircons, thereby countering the claim for Hadean continents. More revealing are zircons found in granite magmas that represent the last dregs of melts formed by giant impact (Darling, J. et al. 2009. Impact melt sheet zircons and their implications for the Hadean. Geology, v. 37, p. 927-930). The huge impact-induced mafic to ultramafic melt sheet at Sudbury, Ontario, formed around 1.85 Ga. Zircons extracted from late-stage granites in the body are similar to those with Hadean ages.

The Great Bend of the Pacific ocean floor

Ocean island chains are trackways of moving lithospheric plates relative to the underlying mantle. Mantle hotspots act in a similar manner to a candle that would burn a line in a sheet of paper were one to be passed over it. The largest, most coherent and best studied ocean island chain is that of the Hawaiian Islands and the Emperor Seamounts in the NW Pacific. The volcanoes that built the chain range in age continuously from Late Cretaceous (81 Ma) at the northern tip of the Emperor Seamounts where they touch the Kamchatka Peninsula to the present in the Big Island of Hawai’i itself. So far, so good for the hotspot-track hypothesis. But the chain is bent into a WNW segment (Hawaii) and one that trends NNW (Emperor). That might seem to be superb evidence that the direction of West Pacific sea-floor spreading underwent a sudden, 60° change around 47 Ma (the age of the Diakakuji seamount at the apex of the bend). However, measurements in 2001 of palaeomagnetic latitude in sea-floor cores along the chain revealed clear palaeomagnetic evidence that the Hawaiian hot spot has not always been fixed relative to moving lithospheric plates. From Late Cretaceous to Late Eocene times the hotspot seems to have been was shifting southwards relative to the north magnetic pole at a rate comparable with that of sea-floor spreading, and then became stationary to explain the 60° bend in the chain (See American Geophysical Union 2001 Fall Meeting in EPN for January 2002).

Further work has been done since 2001, and a review of the huge oddity that bucks John Tuzo Wilson’s 1963 theory of hotspots fixed in space and time is timely (Tarduno, J. et al. 2009. The bent Hawaiian-Emperor hotspot track: inheriting the mantle wind. Science, v. 324, p. 50-53). Data have moved on to suggest that the hotspot is indeed the head of narrow mantle plume originating deep down, perhaps even near the core – mantle boundary (CMB). But could such a massive structure change it’s behaviour so that its head would move? Some have suggested the development of a propagating crack in the Pacific lithosphere and then its closure, but no evidence points unerringly that way. After considering a range of possible mechanisms, the authors suggest that the great bend records past changes in mantle flow beneath the West Pacific, so that the plume would itself have bent in the vertical dimension. Seismic tomography has revealed apparently low-angled zones of hot, low-velocity mantle, such as one that may (or may not) connect with the Afar plume beneath the triple junction of the East African Rift, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden after rising from the CMB south of Cape Town. They are tantalising results, because the resolution is simply not good enough to be sure. It needs an order of magnitude better tomographic resolution of mantle features to truly make more headway.

Rheic Ocean reviewed

Since the late 1960s when John Dewey and a few other geologists began to apply plate-tectonic ideas to palaeogeography, most of us when asked to name an ancient ocean would have blurted out ‘Iapetus’. Yet, another Palaeozoic ocean, the Rheic Ocean, left a far more profound mark on the Palaeozoic world: its closure around the end of the Palaeozoic Era united all the continents in Wegener’s Pangaea supercontinent, and threw up a vast mountain belt at the suture. The earlier evolution of the Rheic Ocean involved the spalling of a series of microcontinental slivers from the flank of the earlier Gondwana supercontinent. Damien Nance and Ulf Linneman review the fascinating story of the Rheic Ocean in a nicely succinct way (R.D. Nance & Linnemann, U. 2008. The Rheic Ocean: Origin, evolution and significance. GSA Today, v. 18 (December 2008m issue), p. 4-12).

Archaean ‘Waterworld’

Readers might remember with some pain the 1995 film Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner: an actor so wooden he could not sink. That was based on the unlikely scenario that if all the ice caps melted the continents would be drowned entirely. In fact that global melting would raise sea level by a mere 67 m. A far higher sea-level rise took place during the Cretaceous, arguably because fast sea-floor spreading and subduction created a larger volume of ‘warm’ and so less-dense ocean lithosphere than there is now. The volume of the ocean basins shrank as a result, displacing ocean water onto low-lying areas of the continents. Something more dramatic has been suggested for the Archaean Earth (Flament, N. et al. 2008. A case for late-Archaean continental emergence from thermal evolution models and hypsometry. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 275, p. 326-336). The starting point for the discussion by Flament and his Australian and French colleagues from the universities of Sydney and Lyon is that the reason for the present hypsometric distribution of surface elevations between ocean floor and continents is cooling of the Earth that has changed the isostatic balance between oceanic and continental lithosphere. That progressively sharpens the topographic contrast thereby increasing continental freeboard. Archaean times involved a hotter mantle due mainly to greater radiogenic heat production. Flament et al. argue that would have lessened the rigidity of continental lithosphere, so reducing the ability of the crust to thicken, whereas ocean floor would have had a higher relative elevation, so reducing ocean basin volume. As in the Cretaceous oceans would have flooded continents, but to a far greater extent, so that as little as 3% of the Earth surface was land.

Are sheeted dykes significant?

More than abyssal sediments, pillow basalt, differentiated gabbro and depleted peridotite sheeted dyke complexes have long been a primary identifier for oceanic lithosphere preserved in ophiolites. That assumption has recently been questioned (Robinson, P.T. et al. 2008. The significance of sheeted dyke complexes in ophiolites. GSA Today, v. 18 (November 2008), p. 4-10). Ian Gass first discovered units made up solely of dykes that intrude one another with no intervening screens of other host rocks in the Troodos ophiolite of Cyprus in 1968. Sheeted dyke complexes became widely regarded as characteristic of extensional, sea-floor spreading environments connected to basaltic magma chambers, each increment of extension being filled with magma. They have also been imaged in eroded walls of ocean fracture systems and cut through by ocean drill cores, supporting this notion. In fact, many ophiolites are devoid of sheeted complexes, despite having all the other components of mafic-ultramafic lithosphere. Robinson et al. argue that sheeted dykes only form where spreading rates and magma supply are balanced, as expected at true constructive plate margins but far less likely at other extensional zones associated with plate tectonics, such as those in back-arc basins above subduction zones. Even at true spreading centres that generate new ocean floor magma supply may not balance extension, for instance where spreading rates are slow. Moreover, a great many ophiolites show geochemical affinities that are more akin to supra-subduction magmatic processes than those that produce mid-ocean ridge basalt.

Plate tectonics in time and space

Seismic tomography becomes increasingly revealing as the capacity of supercomputers grows. On top of that, more sophisticated software allows present-day mantle cross sections to be reverse modelled with surface plate motions to reconstruct an idea of mantle dynamics back to Mesozoic times. Geophysicists at the California Institute of Technology give a taste of the possibilities from the subduction history of North America (Liu, L. et al. 2008. Reconstructing Farallon plate subduction beneath North America back to the Late Cretaceous. Science, v. 322, p. 934-938). Investigating 3-D evolution is the key to connecting rigid plate tectonics and fluid convection that has long been postulated but remains obscure. However, while reasonable reconstructions of global plate motions are possible using sea-floor magnetic stripes that go back to the Cretaceous, seismic tomography only images the mantle’s present structure. So it might seem that generating a 3-D ‘geomovie’ is more of an expensive illusion than a model of past realities.

The logic behind the modelling is that today’s mantle temperature structure – that is what tomograms show – stems from past plate activity. For instance, a deep cold, slab-like anomaly dipping eastward beneath eastern North America can reasonably be inferred to be a relic of the Farallon Plate, which formerly constituted floor of the eastern Pacific. That plate was subducted beneath the west edge of the continent until around 40 Ma, when the East Pacific Rise that had driven it was subducted. The present thermal structure shown by the tomogram has, in a sense, ‘faded’ as a result of thermal relaxation of the original anomalies by heat diffusion. Choosing geologically reasonable starting conditions for long-term evolution of a mantle segment enables iterative forward modelling to try and achieve the present set-up. While there is an element of circularity in this logic, such a dynamic model has a predictive aspect; i.e. as cold, dense material in the mantle sinks it tends to pull the surface downwards, allowing marine flooding of continental interiors. During the Late Cretaceous this did happen spectacularly in North America, and Liu et al’s model shows this. Yet sea level also rose globally at the time, thereby amplifying the inundation. Although geeomodellers will be excited by Liu et al’s developments, it is modelling and even the simplest of models is acutely sensitive to the chosen starting conditions, as meteorologists with vastly more real data at hand have discovered again and again.
See also: Steinburger, B. 2008. Reconstructing Earth history in three dimensions. Science, v. 322, p. 866-868

The ocean that tried to swallow itself

Wegener’s famous supercontinent Pangaea lasted for about 200 Ma from the mid Carboniferous to the late Triassic, and formed a ‘slice world’ extending almost from pole to pole. Yet it had a vast spreading embayment on its eastern side around which wrapped two ‘horns’ of continental lithosphere: an ocean dubbed ‘Palaeotethys’. Another peculiarity is that at its core Pangaea is marked by a huge, orogenic belt that seems to have been buckled on a continental scale: the Iberian-Amorican Arc. Such refolded mountain chains are sometimes referred to as ‘oroclines’, and there is considerable debate about how they might have formed. The latest notion is that slab-pull at a north-dipping subduction zone at the northern edge of Palaeotethys not only caused its spreading centre to be consumed, but thereafter continued to suck at the remaining ocean lithosphere (Gutiérrez-Alonso, G. et al. 2008. Self-subduction of the Pangaean global plate. Nature Geoscience, v. 1, p. 549-553). The stresses involved in attempted closure of the wedge-shaped ocean spur on the otherwise elliptical supercontinent would explain several roughly radial rift systems with voluminous magmatism that formed in Pangaea in Permian times, such as the Oslo graben. Ever ready for a bit of fun, New Scientist has referred to Pangaea in terms of an aged, but well-known computer-game object that apparently turned on itself after consuming all lesser objects (Palmer, J. 2008. Pac-Man supercontinent ate itself to pieces. New Scientist.com News Service, 6 July 2008 http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn14259-pacman-supercontinent-ate-itself-to-pieces.html).

Tibetan Plateau reviewed

The roughly 5 km high Tibetan Plateau is not only the largest area of high elevations on Earth, it helps generate the monsoons of southern and SE Asia. Some have argued that it is a major climatic driver and may have been responsible for overall cooling of the Northern Hemisphere by diverting wind patterns once it had reached its present extent. Tibet may even have influenced global cooling through the Cenozoic by encouraging extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere by liberating enormous quantities of silicate minerals for chemical weathering. From a tectonic standpoint the Plateau is especially fascinating. In the mid-1970 Molnar and Tapponnier proposed that the near-doubling of Tibet’s crustal thickness had created unstable conditions and that crust was being extruded eastwards as a result of gravitational collapse: an evolving example of escape tectonics. There are hundreds of papers on or relating to the Tibetan Plateau, its origin and evolution, so a succinct review is welcome (Roydon, L.H. et al. 2008. The geological evolution of the Tibetan Plateau. Science, v. 321, p. 1054-1058). This centres on the development of the escape tectonics idea over 3 decades, and offers an important regional insight. Widening the context to include the evolution of the West Pacific oceanic lithosphere reveals a link between the timing of plate tectonic events there and changes in crustal collapse far to the west in eastern Tibet and adjacent lands. Soon after India began to collide with Eurasia in the Eocene, the subduction zones of the West Pacific and Indonesia migrated ridgewards, away from Eurasia as a result of trench rollback. This created space into which crustal collapse could spread as the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau were thrown up. This trench migration stopped during the Miocene, severely interfering with the gravitational possibilities for escape tectonics. Effectively, the escape from Tibet was ‘dammed’, and it is from that date that the phenomenal rise to 5 km elevation has taken place. The authors even link this hindrance to the development of seismically hazardous conditions throughout western China, such as the Longmenshan mountains where the magnitude 7.9 12 May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake occurred (Burchfiel, B.C. et al 2008. A geological and geophysical context for the Wenchuan earthquake or 12 May 2008, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China. GSA Today, v. 18 (July 2008), p. 4-11)
See also: Kerr, R.A. 2008. Pumping up the Tibetan Plateau from the far Pacific Ocean. Science, v. 321, p. 1028-1029

A drop off the old block?

It is not so long ago that detachment and foundering of material from lithospheric blocks began to be visualised as a means to explain large areas of recent, rapid uplift of the continental surface. Chunks falling from the subducted slabs beneath Tibet and Kamchatka (see Evidence for slab break-off in subduction zones in EPN September 2002) may have generated unusual magmatism or stopped volcanism respectively. Massive Himalayan uplift and that of areas such as the Sierra Nevada in the western US seem to indicate foundering of large masses of mafic rocks from the base of thickened lower crust (see Mantle dripping off mountain roots in EPN October 2004). Even the end-Miocene Messinian salinity crisis in the Mediterranean has been ascribed to uplift resulting from delamination (see When the Mediterranean dried up in EPN May 2003). Yet convincing evidence from seismic data are conspicuous by their rarity. A necking, or monstrous boudinage of the subducting slab beneath the Hindu Kush region of the Himalayan chain is convincingly demonstrated by geophysicists from the Australian National University (Lister, G. et al, 2008. Boudinage of a stretching slablet implicated in earthquakes beneath the Hindu Kush. Nature Geoscience, v. 1, p. 196-201).

The setting for this remarkable ‘caught in the act’ phenomenon is where a minor ocean basin closed when the Kohistan arc was accreted to Asia during the closure of the Tethys ocean, and is in the process of vanishing. Wherever such minor basins have been caught up in major destructive-margin tectonics they seem to coincide with markedly arcuate orogens characterised by high-P metamorphism and repeated stacking of thrust slices. Once school of thought seeks a solution by some kind of ductile ‘dripping’ of mantle, which the authors sought to test by looking at seismicity beneath the most prominent of these arcuate mini-orogens. What they found was a zone of ‘necking’ defined by clustered earthquakes on either side. Detailed analysis suggests that a drop-shaped mass is in the process of detaching itself by a combination of brittle and ductile deformation –a boudin several orders of magnitude than any the have previously been described.

Is plate tectonics a turn-on or a turn-off?

The dominant force that helps to drive plate motions is the pull exerted by dense cold lithosphere descending subduction zones. If the total length of subduction zones were to increase or decrease, or some other factor affecting the global rate of subduction changed then plate movements overall would be affected. Yet it is plate tectonics that actually removes the bulk of heat continuously generated in the deep Earth by radioactive decay, the amount of which changes very slowly over periods of tens to hundreds of million years. Should plate movements slow or stop that heat would either build up at depth or would emerge in a way unrelated to the motion of plates, perhaps as within-plate magmatism.

Should the Pacific Ocean close, then a large proportion of modern subduction would stop, and some kind of thermal and mechanical compensation would cut-in. There were times in the past when vast oceans did close as supercontinents formed: the formation of Rodinia in the late Mesoproterozoic; the Pan African orogeny of the late Neoproterozoic; the mid-Phanerozoic assembly of Pangaea. Each would have resulted in an order-of-magnitude fall in the rate of subduction. Paul Silver and Mark Behn of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have attempted to judge what kind of thermal and mechanical compensation may have taken place (Silver, P.G & Behn. M.D. 2008. Intermittent plate tectonics. Science, v. 319, p. 85-88). They look at geochemical parameters that ought to act as proxies for subduction processes – the way certain element and isotope proportions in the mantle (Nb/Th and 4He/3He) are affected by the productivity of arc magmatism. Another proxy for subduction intensity is the rate of production of continental crust, assuming reasonably that most is produced from magmas generated at volcanic arcs.

It has become increasingly clear, as the number of absolute ages from the crust has steadily increased, that the continents have formed in a stop-start fashion. Convincingly, Silver and Behn’s synthesis of Nb/Th and 4He/3He ratios in basalts also shows a marked fluctuation in the rate of the mantle’s chemical depletion. It peaked at the end of the Archaean, declined to a minimum around 1 Ga and rose again with the formation of Pangaea at about 300 Ma. The link with supercontinent formation is not simple, although a pattern emerges. Pangaea and the suspected Nuna supercontinent of the Palaeoproterozoic link to peaks in mantle depletion rate, whereas the supercontinents Rodinia and Pannotia (arising from the Pan African) formed while depletion rates were low. Silver and Behn ascribe the differences to two kinds of closure of Pacific-sized oceans following their origination by rifting and drifting of supercontinents. One scenario involves closure of the ocean that once surrounded the supercontinent, as seems to be on the cards for the modern Pacific; P-type closure. The other when the ocean formed passively by break-up is ‘outgunned’ by sea-floor spreading in the once surrounding ocean. That would be the case had the spreading on the East Pacific Rise not involved double subduction around the Pacific margins – the Atlantic would have opened only for both its margins to become subduction zones; A-type closure. Pangaea and possibly Nuna resulted from A-type closure. On the other hand Rodinia and Pannotia seem to have involved circumnavigation of drifting continents to collide at roughly the antipode of the split in a preceding supercontinent by P-type closure.

The conclusion is that plate tectonics was active in the early Earth, becoming intermittent in its middle life and resurrected since a billion years ago. From an examination of the deep thermal consequences of changes in plate motions in the outer Earth, it appears that mantle temperature has fluctuated markedly through time, albeit with a net decrease due to decayed radioactivity. This may have partially ‘switched off’ the conditions for mantle convection that favours plate formation and motion to a more sluggish form. By way of confirmation of their theoretical work, Silver and Behn point to the vast emplacement on most modern continents of granitic and anorthositic plutons under tectonically quiescent conditions that characterised the Grenvillian events preceding the formation of Rodinia between 1.6 to 1.3 Ga.

Pacific plate about to split?

The world’s largest lithospheric plate lies to the west of the East Pacific Rise spreading axis, and extends from 60˚N to 60˚S. A string of volcanic islands connects Easter Island close to the East Pacific Rise to Samoa on the northern end of the Tonga Trench. Each lies above a small hot spot, which collectively define the most densely packed area of active within-plate volcanism on the Pacific Plate. Associated with it is an area of anomalously shallow ocean floor: the South Pacific Superswell. North of this zone the plate velocity has been faster than that of the southern part of the Plate for the last 7 Ma. One explanation for the hot-spot cluster is that it lies above a ‘tear’ that is starting to develop in the Pacific lithosphere (Clouard, V. & Gerbault, M. 2008. Break-up spots: Could the Pacific open as a consequence of plate kinematics? Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 265, p. 195-208). Others dispute this conjecture, but Clouard and Gerbault have modelled strain patterns across the Plate, using plate speeds derived from magnetic stripes and GPS measurements, to predict where volcanism might arise in relation to a focussed shear zone in the lithosphere. The model points directly at the linear cluster of hot spots. Maybe this is the site of a future division of the Pacific Plate into two, the current magmatism perhaps to generate a new, E-W spreading axis. That would be 5 to 20 Ma off, so there is plenty of time to discuss the processes going on.
See also: Reilly, M. 2008. I the Pacific splitting in two. New Scientist, v. 197 (26 January 2008 issue), p. 10.

Lightened load speeded up India’s drift

About 140 Ma ago India split from the other Gondwanan continents, and proceeded northwards eventually to collide with Eurasia around 50 Ma. Its progress was astonishing fast, as continental drift goes, at around 20 cm per year compared with Australia, Africa and Antarctica at little more than a tenth of that speed (Kumar, P. et al. 2007. The rapid drift of the Indian tectonic plate. Nature, v. 449, p. 894-897). Kumar from NGRI in India, and his Chinese and German colleagues, attribute this to the process of Gondwana break-up itself. It probably started when a large mantle plume arrived at the base of the supercontinent’s lithosphere; one now represented by the Marion, Kerguelen and Réunion plumes. The sluggish continents have thick lithospheric roots (180-300 km), whereas India (100 km) does not. So, the subcontinent was an especially light load to be dragged northwards by slab pull beneath Asia. The reason suggested for this is that the early Cretaceous plume destabilised the lithospheric root beneath India, causing it to founder. This might also explain another oddity about Southern India. The area is characterised by some of the largest extents of deep-crustal granulites in the world, which are also by far the highest: the Nilgiri granulites reach 2.6 km above sea level. Isostatic rebound from Cretaceous delamination would nicely explain this anomaly of mountains made of the densest continental materials.

Supercontinents of the past and future

Vigorous plate tectonics on the Earth continually drives continents around on the surface. Inevitably, they will clang together sooner or later, along with new sialic crust formed in island arcs that older continental masses sweep up. The more continental crust the more likely it is that all of it will accumulate in a supercontinent. Geologists know for sure of three: Alfred Wegener’s Pangaea (250-200 Ma); Greater Gondwana that clumped together the modern southern continents at 600 Ma and ended up in Pangaea; Rodinia (1100-750 Ma). There are suspicions of earlier assemblies in the Palaeoproterozoic and Archaean, but the crucial palaeomagnetism method for confirming reconstructions breaks down before Rodinia’s times. Also, much has happened since 2 billion years ago so that all but shreds of geological evidence have become scrambled.

If plate tectonics is regularly paced over long periods, and that is quite likely as it is driven by slowly dwindling radioactive mantle heating, maybe there ought to be some kind of cycle of supercontinent assembly. But there again, once formed why shouldn’t sea-floor spreading in the corresponding super-ocean hold a supercontinent together and still efficiently dissipate the Earth internal heat production? The information to hand indicates that they can last a while (400 Ma in the case of Gondwana) but eventually break up. It has been pretty certain for some time that mantle plumes from the core-mantle boundary don’t follow the same motions as do surface plates, so sooner or later one pops up beneath a continent. The bigger the continent the greater the chance that a plume will perturb it, the more so as thick continental lithosphere will act as a thermal ‘lid’ because of the sluggishness of conductive heat transfer through rigid bodies. It is possible to model the two processes of continental drift/collision and the rise of plumes (Phillips, B.R. & Bunge, H-P. 2007. Supercontinent cycles disrupted by strong plumes. Geology, v. 35, p. 847-850). What the US and German co-authors discovered from their model is that planets like the Earth cannot settle into long-term tectonically stable modes. Periodicity is unlikely, and what might look like a kind of regularity – some authors, beginning with J. Tuzo Wilson, have argued for ~400 Ma cycles – is merely an artefact of there having been only a few supercontinents in the geological past.

This will come as a bit of blow to the authors of an entertaining speculation about the future of plate tectonics (Williams, C. & Nield, E. 2007. Pangaea, the comeback. New Scientist, v. 196 (20 October 2007), p. 36-40). Williams and Nield depend on there really being cyclicity in plate tectonics, and they are not the first to have a shot at predicting a world that will not harbour anything passably human; there has been NovoPangaea, Amasia and Pangaea Proxima scheduled for a quarter of a billion years hence. Yes, they would be odd worlds, in the same way as all supercontinents would be alien to those of us used to being no more than 2600 km from the seaside (at the continental pole of inaccessibility in NW China). There would be odd weather patterns, an odd climate overall and mountains where now there are plains and shallow seas. Evolution would slow down both in the seas and on the continents, since all life would potentially interact and there would be fewer ecological niches. A point that ought not to be lost, especially on the authors, is that we can only have such speculative fun by referring to what we do know from the past. So I am surprised that a major impact that wipes out all life except for prokaryotes isn’t built into the playful scenario.

The oldest ophiolite

The Isua area of West Greenland is probably the most prowled over piece of geological real estate in the world, and is certainly one of the oldest, dated at ~3.8 Ga. Close to the Greenland ice cap, melting bared the fresh rock in the last few thousand years and there is little vegetation, soil or weathering. The area can be mapped and intricate details extracted at scales down to 1:100, and parts of it probably have been examined on hands and knees. The reason for the attention, apart from its antiquity, is that the rocks are recognisably metamorphosed volcanics and sediments, albeit quite highly deformed in places. There are conglomerates that prove deposition by moving water, fine iron-rich cherts that may have formed in submarine hot springs and pillow lavas effused underwater. The cherts would, if unmetamorphosed, be good places to look for signs of early life, and indeed carbon isotopes extracted from apatites in them have been suggested to show signs of life (more recent work failed to find any sign of carbon in such apatites, so the ancient-life aspect of Isua is somewhat tarnished). The lavas and accompanying igneous rocks attract geologists interested in ancient tectonics (Furnes, H. et al. 2007. A vestige of the Earth’s oldest ophiolite. Science, v. 315, p. 1704-1707). Furnes et al. are not the first to suggest that Isua preserves an ophiolite and evidence for early Archaean plate tectonics, that distinction having gone to a Japanese team 8 years before, who did map on their hands and knees. However, Furnes and colleagues did drive in the final nail—a sheeted-dyke component discovered in the complex—and describe the basalt geochemistry.

Geochemically, the Isua pillow lavas show affinities with both intra-oceanic island arc and mid-ocean ridge settings, their oxygen isotopes indicating extensive involvement of seawater in their alteration. Inevitably, geochemists will have another shot at signs of the earliest life, and perhaps evidence will be found for ‘black smokers’, the hydrothermal vents which today are colonised by weird and sometimes primitive microbial life forms. Yet Furnes et al. report, astonishingly, ‘…the strain history of these rocks is not yet sufficiently well-known to permit a detailed reconstruction of the Isua ophiolite complex’. On your knees, ladies and gentlemen…

Tectonics

Ocean-floor topography-age correlation challenged

Joining the Neoproterozoic dots

An old theory resurrected

Dating subduction

Phew, there is a mantle plume under Hawaii after all

Hot tectonics in the Archaean

Evidence for Hadean continental crust takes a knock

The Great Bend of the Pacific ocean floor

Rheic Ocean reviewed

Archaean ‘Waterworld’

Are sheeted dykes significant?

Plate tectonics in time and space

The ocean that tried to swallow itself

Tibetan Plateau reviewed

A drop off the old block?

Is plate tectonics a turn-on or a turn-off?

Pacific plate about to split?

Lightened load speeded up India’s drift

Supercontinents of the past and future

The oldest ophiolite

How the asthenosphere loses its strength

Evidence supporting mantle plumes

Clues to Archaean tectonics

Detection of rifting due to dyke emplacement

Folds in the mantle

Afar and the African superplume

Crustal spreading from the Tibetan Plateau

When did Tibet rise?

Earth’s biggest ‘bull’s eye’

Detecting the effects of slab to wedge fluid transfer in subduction zones

Erosion and plate tectonics

The boys on the black stuff

Mantle dripping off mountain roots

Quantifying motions inside continents

Geoscience consensus challenged

More, or less plumes

Wetting oceanic lithosphere

Zircons that wander

Setting up subduction

Wandering hot spots

Rodinia muddles

Plume debates

Hydrogeology of sea-floor cooling

Eskola's mantled gneiss domes revisited

Archaean tectonics was different

Orphan terranes and tectonic names

Slab pull versus subduction suction

Continental insulation at the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary

The lost world of the Galápagos hotspot track

Cunning means of estimating uplift

Evidence for slab break-off in subduction zones

Seismic tomography and the African superplume

Subduction metamorphism and earthquakes

Continental roots

Serpentine: the Vaseline of subduction

Mantle motions from seismic tomography

Continental growth and strike-slip tectonics

New Japanese tectonics research centre

Vertical tectonics and formation of Archaean crust

EarthScope

Continental tectonics of eastern Eurasia

Where do subducted slabs go?

Between a rock and a hard place

Conferring strength to cratons

Partially melted zones beneath Tibet

Brazilian input to the growth of Gondwana

The origin of microcontinental terranes

African roots

Subducted slab being torn apart

Chinese crust in miraculous escape

Heads or tails?

The guts of a sea-floor spreading system

Subduction

Geodynamics

Differential Motion in the Earth's Core