Scaling relations are important in extrapolating laboratory experiments to the Earth’s mantle. In planetary interiors, compression becomes an important parameter and it is useful to explore scalings that involve volu...Scaling relations are important in extrapolating laboratory experiments to the Earth’s mantle. In planetary interiors, compression becomes an important parameter and it is useful to explore scalings that involve volume. I use sim- ple volume scaling relations that allow one to extrapolate laboratory experiments and upper mantle behavior, in a thermodynamically self-consistent way, to predict lower mantle behavior. The relations are similar to the quasi-har- monic approximation. Slabs and plates have characteristic dimensions of hundreds of kilometers and time constants of 100 million years, but the volume scalings predict order of magnitude higher values in the deep mantle. The scaling relations imply that the deep mantle is a sluggish system with ancient features. They imply irreversible chemical stratifica- tion and do not favor the plume hypothesis.展开更多
文摘Scaling relations are important in extrapolating laboratory experiments to the Earth’s mantle. In planetary interiors, compression becomes an important parameter and it is useful to explore scalings that involve volume. I use sim- ple volume scaling relations that allow one to extrapolate laboratory experiments and upper mantle behavior, in a thermodynamically self-consistent way, to predict lower mantle behavior. The relations are similar to the quasi-har- monic approximation. Slabs and plates have characteristic dimensions of hundreds of kilometers and time constants of 100 million years, but the volume scalings predict order of magnitude higher values in the deep mantle. The scaling relations imply that the deep mantle is a sluggish system with ancient features. They imply irreversible chemical stratifica- tion and do not favor the plume hypothesis.
