Disclaimer: Este es un PDF generado automáticamente a partir del contenido seleccionado de nuestros productos.

Esta función se
ofrece únicamente para su conveniencia y, de ninguna manera, pretende reemplazar el PDF escaneado del original. Ni Cengage
Learning ni sus emisores de licencias representan u ofrecen garantías respecto de los archivos PDF generados automáticamente.
El PDF se genera de manera automática "TAL CUAL" y "SEGÚN DISPONIBILIDAD" y no se guarda en nuestros sistemas.
CENGAGE LEARNING Y SUS EMISORES DE LICENCIAS RENUNCIAN DE MANERA ESPECÍFICA A CUALQUIER O A TODA
GARANTÍA EXPRESA O IMPLÍCITA, INCLUIDA, PERO SIN LIMITARSE A, CUALQUIER GARANTÍA SOBRE DISPONIBILIDAD,
EXACTITUD, TIEMPO REAL, INTEGRIDAD, AUSENCIA DE INFRACCIÓN, COMERCIABILIDAD O IDONEIDAD PARA UN
DETERMINADO FIN. El uso que realice del PDF generado automáticamente está sujeto a todas las restricciones de uso incluidas
en el Acuerdo de licencia y suscripción de Cengage Learning y en los Términos y condiciones de Gale In Context: Opposing
Viewpoints. Asimismo, si usa la función de generación automática de PDF, acuerda renunciar a toda reclamación contra Cengage
Learning o sus emisores de licencias para el uso de la función de generación automática de PDF y de cualquier resultado que
derive de ella.

The Chicken, the Egg, and Plate Tectonics: Whole-planet

models could upend our view of how geophysical forces
shape the Earth.
Autor: Nicolas Coltice
Fecha: May-June 2021
De: American Scientist(Vol. 109, Issue 3)
Editorial: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
Tipo de documento: Article
Extensión: 5.079 palabras
Nivel de contenido: (Level 5)
Medición Lexile: 1320L

Texto completo:
Ten years ago, I took a fateful train trip from my home in Lyon, France, through the Alps, mountains forged by Earth's powerful forces
over millions of years, to Zurich, Switzerland. At the time, my thoughts weren't on the majestic scenery, but on one of the biggest
puzzles in Earth science: how to connect the huge, invisible motions of the deep Earth to the detailed, dramatic changes on the
planet's surface. These processes created the Alps, move continents, and have helped keep our planet habitable for billions of years.
At the other end of the trip, Paul Tackley and Tobias Rolf showed me some remarkable work that promised the beginning of a
meaningful answer.

Tackley, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, had spent three decades developing computational
strategies for modeling mantle convection on parallel supercomputers. I hoped to use his mathematical models and code to work on
the problem that had grabbed my attention. I had realized that plate tectonics was only scratching the surface of explaining the
geophysics shaping our globe, and I wondered about temperature changes below the continents over geologic timescales. Rolf, one
of Tackley's doctoral students, had similar interests, and they proposed that we collaborate.

As I sat in Rolf's office, they showed me animations that represented years of hard work. Though they were still rough around the
edges, I was awestruck and almost wondered if I was hallucinating. On the screen, distinctive natural ridge patterns formed within
oceans; subductions commenced and died out.

That night at my hotel, my mind raced. We could simulate plate tectonics and mantle convection simultaneously. I realized that this
work could be the beginning of building comprehensive models of Earth's movements, analogous to those for its climate. In 2018, we
ran the most comprehensive and realistic model of an Earth-like planet ever. And today, such models are reshaping our notions of
how our planet and others like it evolve.

Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics

The Earth has changed dramatically in its 4.5-billion-year life span. But only within the past century have we started to appreciate the
ways that geophysics on Earth's surface and deep below are constantly shaping the planet. In the early 20th century, German
climatologist Alfred Wegener proposed the idea of continental drift and the idea of supercontinents, synthesized in his 1915 book The
Origin of Continents and Oceans. But he also described incorrect driving mechanisms and drift speed. The idea was largely ignored
and ridiculed by famous physicists at the time, but it started to gain some traction by the 1930s.

Until the 1950s, most of what we knew about the structure in the deep Earth came from continental rock samples and geophysical
data such as seismology and gravity measurements. But in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists mapped the ocean floor with sounding
studies and examined its geology through oceanography missions. The discoveries of structures--such as underwater escarpments,
volcanoes, 100-kilometer-long faults such as the Great Sumatran Fault (which caused the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and
tsunami), and 10-kilometer-deep trenches such as the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean--pushed the community of
geoscientists to imagine new principles for the origin of Earth's landscapes: seafloor spreading. Everything pointed toward constant
lateral motion of rocks, consistent with continents drifting slowly at about 1 to 10 centimeters per year, the speed of the growth of
fingernails and hair. And today with the Global Positioning System, we can measure these continuous motions and their jolts over
decades.
Those ideas laid the foundation for plate tectonics (see sidebar "Plate Tectonics: Explaining Earth's Evolution," above). This
framework simplifies the Earth's lithosphere--the crust and the outer mantle--into a set of massive, rigid pieces. They collide,
overrunning each other and forcing a plate's edge downward into the hot mantle.

But real rocks are far more elastic and plastic, and they deform both temporarily and permanently. The ground can experience tides
like oceans, moving up or down by up to 20 centimeters per day. Fault lines permanently deform plates through displacement and
seismic waves. Apparently solid rocks also flow on geological time scales, like ice within glaciers. The Himalayas, for example, have
beautiful rock structures formed by these processes. Groups of atoms and molecules dislocate and diffuse to accommodate massive
stresses.

The organization of plates on Earth is peculiar and seems to have persisted for a minimum of 150 million years. A few large plates--a
total of seven today, such as the Pacific plate--connect with about 50 smaller plates of various sizes. The Pacific plate has 10 times
the area of the continental United States, and it borders the U.S. Pacific Coast, Japan, and New Zealand. It connects with the smaller
Philippine plate, which has half the U.S. land area and is also bordered by China and Australia. The smaller plates are distributed
across the Earth's surface, much like the debris from broken glass.

Geodynamicists have built models to simulate the forces that are shaping these movements that sculpt our planet. Elevation
differences can allow gravity to shape large rock formations: Thick, high mountains can push down on the surrounding areas,
particularly if there is limited resistance from the area below. At colder surface temperatures, rocks break, but in the warmer mantle
depths they flow. A similar effect occurs where plates meet in the deep ocean to form ridges--the weight of new, hot, solidified
magma seeping up to the surface pushes plates downward and apart, a force known as ridge push. Friction can cause plates to
catch, causing resistance as they slide across each other. At boundaries where plates collide, slab pull describes how the heavy
sinking section of the plate in subduction tows an entire plate with it. Finally, the mantle--the hot rocks slowly flowing within the Earth--
has its own convection, simmering up matter and heat from within like a planetary saucepan. That convection can create a force
known as mantle drag on the surface. All of these forces interact, slowly and constantly, sculpting the Earth along the way.

Making Models

These models have led to a paradoxical question: Is the Earth shaped from the inside out or from the outside in? Since the 1970s,
scientists have constructed computational models to piece together these forces and evaluate which ones dominate. They made
models of the ocean floor and computed the forces needed to displace rigid blocks of the Earth's crust at the velocities we observe at
the surface. But such models showed conflicting results. In most cases, slab pull dominated ridge push. In some models, slab pull,
the sinking force from the surface, is stronger than mantle drag, the convective force from within. But in other models it is the
opposite.

To deal with these contradictions, researchers have taken a step back to try to evaluate the whole system simultaneously. The
Earth's mantle and crust are made of similar materials--silicate rocks--and the deep mantle forces overlap with those forces operating
at the surface. To begin to tackle that problem, researchers started building more comprehensive computer models that treated the
mantle and the crust as pieces of a global system, and simulated forces between these small parcels. Such models used simple
properties of materials and could only take a single snapshot of the Earth's geology. Overall, the game of modeling plates' dynamics
and mantle convection requires estimating how rocks deform and how the temperature changes within the Earth over millions of
years.

Building on an analogy to Newton's second law, we can compute mass times acceleration from the balance between stresses and
buoyancy. What makes this calculation easier is that acceleration is negligible: The kinetic energy of the Pacific plate moving at 10
centimeters per year is so small that it is equivalent to that of a car moving at 40 kilometers per hour. This limit means that the
velocity of a tectonic plate at a given time does not depend on its original velocity. Instead, modelers work to estimate the forces
within the rocks: the stresses and buoyancy within every small volume of the mantle-crust system. Unlike modeling atmospheric or
ocean circulation, stresses require understanding how matter resists, and rocks' resistance depends on temperature, pressure, and
the stress itself. Buoyancy primarily depends on temperature, but chemistry can be important in the mantle's deepest regions.

Through smaller-scale laboratory experiments geoscientists explore how stresses such as pressure and temperature deform rocks.
They place small cylinders of rocks within a press at what geologists consider low temperature, less than 400 degrees Celsius. Under
these conditions, the stress limits that break these rock cylinders are similar, even with different rock types. At higher temperature,
above 500 degrees Celsius, cylinders start to flow at a stress limit and eventually yield. Scientists have refined and pushed these
experiments, changing apparatus, sample sizes, and shapes. They also do these experiments at high pressure and examine the
samples' structure with powerful microscopes.

At temperatures greater than 1,500 degrees Celsius and high pressure, deformation laws and physical mechanisms aren't
ambiguous. But the flow of rocks at lower temperature remains difficult to express simply. Diverse microscopic ways to deform the
rock compete with one another. The common ground is the effect on the rocks. When a stress limit is reached, solid-state flow
localizes itself on small bands that become very weak. There, deformation becomes easier and even more localized as stress
increases, and often as strain increases, too.

Buoyancy forces within the Earth's mantle emerge from the density differences between adjacent volumes of rocks. As temperature
rises, density decreases because rocks expand when they heat up. Therefore, hot regions inside the Earth are locally lighter and tend
to rise, whereas cold regions are denser and sink. Chemical differences also affect buoyancy, as iron-rich rocks are usually denser
than magnesium-rich rocks. In the deepest mantle, seismological studies suggest that sections of the Earth's mantle as large as
continents have distinct chemistry, and scientists do laboratory experiments with micron-sized rock samples under extreme pressures
and temperatures to understand how their buoyancy changes under those conditions.
But these laboratory samples are small when compared with vast continental blocks, and the time it takes to run the stress
experiments is much shorter than natural rock deformation. To interpret these microscopic effects in terms of tectonics, mountains, or
flow within the Earth's mantle, we must integrate these results within a whole-planet evolution model.

By the end of the 1990s, a handful of geodynamicists had developed software to solve for the balance of stress and buoyancy while
accounting for rock deformation over a volume comparable to the Earth's mantle. They simplified the way rocks would flow at low
temperature but preserved the essential features. But a key challenge both then and now is that rocks can flow at different rates over
short distances. On Earth, almost all deformation at the surface occurs at plate boundaries, which can be as narrow as 10 kilometers;
therefore, the modelers had to build algorithms that could incorporate important changes at this local level but encompass a whole-
planet. Moreover, modeling the flow laws that were built from these laboratory experiments of small rock volumes on a much larger,
Earth-like scale didn't immediately produce motions that resembled tectonic plates. We needed to tweak mathematical parameters to
find solutions that depict the spreading ridges and plunging trenches as large rocky plates pull apart and collide with one another.

Even with improved mathematics, such calculations require extremely large computational resources: months of time on large
supercomputers with parallel processors. By 1995, supercomputers were finally sophisticated enough that several groups in the world
could move from smaller convection models to fully 3D spherical models. By 2010, these systems were far more affordable and more
accessible. From that point, making more complex global models that incorporated local details became possible. At about the same
time, Tackley had improved his code to solve equations with variable material properties, which allowed us to use flow laws with
stress limits and scale them up to study convection with tectonics.

Pushing Models to Extremes

Before I started working with Tackley and Rolf on large, 3D models, I had studied the chemical structure of the Earth's mantle. For
decades, geochemists had proposed that the mantle was stratified into chemically distinct upper and lower mantle, whereas
geophysicists proposed that rocks were moving throughout the whole mantle. However, it was unclear how significant land masses or
long-lived chemical domains could remain intact within a convecting, simmering system. I fitted chemical observations from magmatic
hot spots--such as mid-ocean ridges, Hawai'i, and the Galapagos Islands---with geophysical observations. Ultimately, our research
helped build consensus between the two viewpoints: The mantle is not dynamically stratified in shells, but distributed, chemically
distinct domains can resist mixing from top to bottom over billions of years.

While working on that project, I realized that the biggest issue was understanding exactly how continents formed. Indeed, when new
continental crust is generated, some elements are sucked into the crust, which alters mantle composition. Also, continents are a
component of mantle convection and help drive the long-term cooling of the planet. Working with petrologists, I made models
showing how the formation of a supercontinent would heat up the rocks beneath it. To solve that problem, I needed to account for
plate-like behavior in my models with drifting continents, which is what led me to contact Tackley in the first place.

I also sensed that Tackley and Rolf hadn't completely recognized the full power of their 3D models. While lying in bed in that Zurich
hotel room in 2010,1 realized that we finally had the computational power and the algorithms to model Earth's depths in the way that
climate scientists and meteorologists model the layers of atmosphere that envelop it.

I wanted to be able to understand the Earth's interior at the same level of detail and complexity that climate researchers could model
atmospheric currents and storm fronts. The fundamental limits of plate tectonics come from assuming that the plates interacting on
the Earth's surface are perfectly rigid, and from neglecting the physical mechanisms at play. Dynamic models--like those employed in
climate modeling and weather prediction--allow us to use softer, more "fluid" boundaries, and to observe the evolution of forces over
time. Weather forecasting takes observations from various locations and time points and then uses physical models to extrapolate
conditions over days to come. A similar opportunity exists for tectonic plates, by extrapolating into the past rather than projecting into
the future, but with much slower processes. We needed to generate a new model that was predictive enough for tectonics, and
software that was robust enough to incorporate observations to reconstruct the evolution across our vast planet over the past tens to
hundreds of millions of years.

But though I now had a clear goal in mind, realizing it would take years of work. First, we would have to push the limits of Tackley and
Rolf's models so that they would capture the essentials of Earth's tectonics. Claire Mallard, a doctoral student in my group, started
working with these models as if they represented a real planet. She understood what it would take for us to generate virtual planets
with an Earth-like plate jigsaw.

Through a series of models Mallard developed, we learned that the deep motions of the mantle forge the largest plates, whereas the
resistance of the plates close to subduction zone shatters larger chunks of crust into a suite of smaller shards. Both results depend
on one physical property: the rocks' resistance close to the surface. When rocks have higher resistance, subduction remains
infrequent; plates remain large rather than fracturing into smaller pieces. If plates are much softer, large plates can't remain intact, but
fold and crack into smaller parts. Because we see a distribution of plate sizes across the Earth's surface, it's clear that mantle forces
are comparable to the plates' resistance, and both factors shape how seafloor spreads and continents drift. Mallard's work gave us a
clear guide to which parameters matter within the model.

Then another doctoral student, Maelis Arnould, and I pushed the models more, to build a full model of an Earth-like planet from crust
to interior. To reach that goal we had to optimize the time it would take for computers to solve our equations, without compromising
the quality of the numerical solution. Because a whole-planet calculation running in three dimensions would take months, we also had
to design tricks that would help us find key parameters for our equations. We couldn't rely on blind trial and error when we ran the full
3D model.

To develop those tricks, I spent a summer launching trial calculations and letting them run for a week or so. Then I'd stop them,
evaluate the results, adjust parameters, and try again. That experience allowed me to develop intuition so we could make choices
that made it possible to run the model in months rather than years.

While I built the computational framework for our big model, Arnould used 2D models to understand how convection currents shape
the observed topography. Those models helped us explain how to interpret the evolution of observed features such as seafloor
elevation or continental margins moving up and down over longer distances, between 500 and 10,000 kilometers.

Within our models, the viscosity law, which describes how rocks flow and deform, plays a central role. We formulate the law so that it
varies with temperature. Cold rocks are stiff whereas hot rocks are soft. We also account for how rocks resist stress, and once the
rocks reach a threshold, their viscosity decreases, and they soften. To be Earth-like, the mantle's average viscosity must be set at a
level to generate sufficiently vigorous convection. And our models needed to calculate at sufficient grid points across the globe to
resolve the equations with a supercomputer and get sharp, detailed images of the plates and their interactions. Our model planet was
divided into 50 million 3D cells, and we incorporated 1 billion tracers within the system to follow transport material properties in the
circulation.

A single snapshot of our model generated more than 20 gigabytes of data. A key challenge in this modeling work is that convection
and plates interact as a complex system. The resulting tectonic behavior is an emergent property that results from the numerous
interactions that influence it. Such results are unpredictable, like trying to forecast the movement of a large crowd of people based on
individuals. The same was true for our models--though we chose a set of parameters and started our calculation, we couldn't know if
Earth-like tectonics with subduction or supercontinent cycles would emerge. Model features are woven together so intricately that
such models need to nm for many months, and we needed several models to truly understand how our initial assumptions shaped
our models' results.

Because of the size and complexity of this model, I knew that it would take months to run and that we'd have only one chance to see
if it would work. That part of the work was daunting and lonely--much like taking a small boat out to explore open ocean.

Watching a Planet Evolve

By 2018, we were ready to start calculations that would be the closest possible simulation of Earth. The whole model took nine
months to run, but we checked in on its progress regularly. Each simulation day represented several million years on Earth, but in
that time span a continent moves by approximately 100 kilometers, the distance between New York City and Philadelphia. We
needed 10 days of computing to simulate 50 million years, the time it took to form the Alps. Over those months we became
increasingly excited as we saw Earth-like features evolve from drifting continents to the plunging seafloor. We watched deep trenches
and hot-spot swells emerge. Features that looked like plates formed, and sometimes initiated subduction at their boundaries, as hot
material from the mantle rose toward the surface.

Even though I put years into developing this model, we were several months along before I realized that this dynamic model could be
a scientific leap forward, beyond making an impressive movie. There was so much I could do, but at the same time the data was
overwhelming to analyze. I spent two weeks in a small workshop in the South of France with my group, several other early-career
scientists, as well as Laurent Husson from the University of Grenoble in France, Claudio Faccenna from Roma Tre University, and
Thorsten Becker from the University of Texas at Austin. They helped me focus on the forces behind plate tectonics. With the models
we built, mantle and plates make a single self-organized system, in which plates and tectonics are emergent properties. Hence, we
could use the model to study where the driving forces in the system were operating, and how they would evolve over geologic
timescales. We could begin to explore and describe the relationships between the deeper Earth and the surface: topography, motion
of the axis of rotation relative to the Earth's solid shells, the connection between the deep Earth and climate, and changes in the
magnetic field behavior in response to mantle convection and tectonics. These models now produce data that we can compare
directly to the geological and geophysical record.

In addition to the nine-month-long calculation, I have made other smaller, simpler models, because a single calculation isn't sufficient
for understanding this system. Bringing these together, we concluded that this self-organized system with mantle circulation
generated plate tectonics, and the dominant forces that we observe are localized within the first 100 kilometers below the surface.
The locations that produce these forces are essentially subduction zones. In these areas, the circulation within the mantle under
subducting plates does not follow surface motions. It's not behaving like the ocean surface in response to wind.

On the other hand, in the continental areas, and especially under growing mountains, the key forces are located deeper, between
100 and 500 kilometers, and show us that the movements of the mantle can drag the surface. In this case, motions at the surface are
slower than when forces are shallow, moving approximately 1 centimeter per year instead of 10.

The deeper forces dominate when continents come together, ultimately forming mountain ranges through collision. In Earth's history,
this corresponds to the period 300 million years ago when Pangea formed, and possibly in more recent continental aggregations.
Africa collides with Eurasia today, India aggregated 50 million years ago, and within the past million years Australia has been inching
toward Indonesia. We also could study the role of mantle plumes, localized currents of hot rocks rising from the base of the mantle,
hitting the base of plates and generating volcanic activity. For example, Hawai'i and Iceland were built up from the magmatic activity
generated by plumes, but researchers have questioned whether magmatic activity breaks up continents. Our models suggest that
rising plumes aren't the primary force that carves continents into pieces; instead, these plumes heat up the rocks and soften them,
making deformation easier. As a consequence, when continents are in tension, new plate boundaries tend to cut through them.
Plumes located today below Iceland, Tristan da Cunha, or Bouvet helped cleave the last supercontinent, Pangea, into different pieces
in the past 200 million years.

Waiting for months to generate digital planetary evolutions was worth it, because the combination of models finally gives us a
comprehensive view of which forces drive the tectonic motions we observe today and all the previous cycles of continental
aggregation and dispersal.

Next, we'd like to study transform faults, such as the San Andreas Fault. In my model, these active boundaries are diffuse and broad,
but on Earth they are prominent structures, and we don't know how they initiate and evolve. We would also like to understand how
mountains are made and how plate tectonics evolved since the Archean, Earth's earliest geological period. Eventually we hope to
investigate how changes in plate tectonics might influence the evolution of Earth's magnetic field and climate. These questions have
always been important, but now that we have a global model of convection, we can look for sophisticated, detailed answers.

Modeling Other Worlds

As with plate tectonics theory, our models aren't perfect. For instance, our models cannot account for surface erosion, brittle faulting
in the upper crust, magma migration, or rock elasticity. But with our models,, scientists finally have a powerful tool to elucidate the
physics underlying plate tectonics. Other groups and their studies and software laid the foundation, but we designed and executed
the global model to generate the fundamentals of tectonics and deep mantle motion.

My goal was never to replicate a synthetic planet, but to build tools and data to scrutinize and test the links between surface
observations and forces within planetary depths. The physics within our models aren't limited to Earth. They should also work for
studying other planets, allowing scientists to explore the relationships between the interiors of Mercury, Venus, and Mars and their
surfaces.

That idea is especially tantalizing as NASA's InSight mission now takes seismic measurements on the surface of Mars, opening our
eyes to the way its mantle works. (A rock that Mallard, Patrice Rey, and I collected in Australia's Pilbara region in 2015 is on Mars
today, used to calibrate the Perseverance Rover's SuperCam.) Physics from our models alongside data from the Red Planet could
help scientists work out key questions such as whether Mars might have had plate tectonics early in its history. One day we hope that
computers could help planetary scientists understand why the first four planets of our Solar System have such stark differences,
although they are composed of similar matter. Stepping beyond Earth opens up a more universal goal: not just how the laws of
physics have shaped the evolution of our planet, but also how they sculpt other worlds.

QUICK TAKE

For nearly half a century, plate tectonics has provided a simple, convenient way to explain the formation of mountains and deep-sea
trenches and movement along fault lines.

Geological and geophysical experiments combined with supercomputers and algorithms allow us to model how internal and external
forces shape the Earth's surface.

Just as large-scale atmospheric models can probe climate, these new whole-planet models allow us to better understand the physical
forces that continue to sculpt the planet.

Plate Tectonics: Explaining Earth's Evolution

For decades, scientists have used plate tectonics to describe how the Earth's surface is organized and changes over time. Although
simplified, it is a useful tool for describing--in broad terms--how the Earth's cooler lithosphere moves in response to its hotter interior.
Plate tectonics allows researchers and students alike to intuitively map the Earth's planetary jigsaw puzzle based on a global map of
elevation from the land and seafloor.

The Earth's lithosphere includes several large plates and dozens of smaller ones. At some boundaries they diverge (white arrows),
pulling apart at the seams to allow magma to seep upward and form ridges. At convergent boundaries, plates collide (red arrows),
and one plate's edge crumples and folds under the other, plunging into the mantle at a subduction zone. At other boundaries, rocky
plates can slip and slide against each other along the surface (green arrows), through transverse motion.

Several forces interact to drive these motions. At convergent boundaries, slab pull drags one plate under its neighbor and pulls the
entire plate along with it. That movement, in turn, pulls a plate away from another plate, creating a divergent boundary on its far edge.
At divergent boundaries, as fresh magma seeps upward, new rock rises to the top, forming an elevated ridge.

Bibliography

Arnould, M. N. Coltice, N. Flament, and C. Mallard. 2020. Plate tectonics and mantle controls on plume dynamics. Earth and
Planetary Science Letters 547:116439.

Arnould, M., N. Coltice, N. Flament, V. Seigneur, and R. D. Muller. 2018. On the scales of dynamic topography in whole-mantle
convection models. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 19:3140-3163.

Bercovici, D., Y. Ricard, and M. A. Richards. 2000. The relation between mantle dynamics and plate tectonics: A primer. Geophysical
Monograph-American Geophysical Union 121:5-46.

Coltice, N., M. Gerault, and M. Ulvrova. 2017. A mantle convection perspective on global tectonics. Earth-Science Reviews
165:120-150.

Coltice, N., L. Husson, C. Faccenna, and M. Arnould. 2019. What drives tectonic plates? Science Advances 5:eaax4295.
Conrad, C. P., and C. Lithgow-Bertelloni. 2002. How mantle slabs drive plate tectonics. Science 298:207-209.

Forsyth, D., and S. Uyeda. 1975. On the relative importance of the driving forces of plate motion. Geophysical Journal International
43:163-200.

Mallard, C., W. Coltice, M. Seton, R. D. Muller, and P. J. Tackley. 2016. Subduction controls the distribution and fragmentation of
Earth's tectonic plates. Nature 535:140-143.

Nicolas Coltice is professor of geodynamics and director of studies in the Geosciences Department of Ecole Normale Superieure in
Paris, France. He blends geological, geophysical, and geochemical observations and dynamic models to understand the underlying
laws of physics that drive planetary evolution. Email: coltice@protonmail.com

Caption: The San Andreas Fault runs for 1,200 kilometers through most of California and marks the point where two large plates--the
North American and Pacific--meet Such boundaries can create new mountains, valleys, and volcanoes. Models show how
movements deep in the Earth also connect to these surface changes.

Caption: Deep motions within the mantle form the Earth's largest tectonic plates, and resistance at subduction zones shatters them
into smaller fragments. This model, by Claire Mallard, the author, and their colleagues, maps viscosity on the planet surface against
mantle flow beneath. Dark blue regions are continents, which represent high viscosity, whereas red boundaries on the surface
represent low viscosity plate boundaries. Inside the model, reds represent hot spots, and light blue areas are subducting slabs.

Caption: The author and Maelis Amould, along with their colleagues, have built a geophysical model of an entire Earth-like planet that
incorporates both the planet's surface (left column) and the convection of its interior (right column). Colored regions highlight areas
where plates meet and interact, such as shallow mid-ocean ridges (oranges) and deep subduction zones (blues) where one plate
plunges beneath another. Simultaneously, the hot mantle convects deep within the planet with plumes of soft rock that shoot toward
the surface.

Caption: Complex geophysical forces also shape other planets in our Solar System. Mars has a network of faults and trenches, such
as the Cerberus Fossae, shown in this image from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. Advanced seismic data from
the current NASA InSight mission in combination with whole-planet models could help researchers understand how the Red Planet
evolved, too.

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

http://www.americanscientist.org/
Cita de fuente (MLA9)
Coltice, Nicolas. "The Chicken, the Egg, and Plate Tectonics: Whole-planet models could upend our view of how geophysical forces
shape the Earth." American Scientist, vol. 109, no. 3, May-June 2021, pp. 166+. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660113315/OVIC?u=unam&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=036adac5. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.
Número de documento de Gale: GALE|A660113315