3 ms·
Older ocean crust does indeed generally subduct at a steeper angle! Relatedly, if you have ocean crust that is relatively young and hot enough but is still coll
by cbkeller 5y ago
Older ocean crust does indeed generally subduct at a steeper angle! Relatedly, if you have ocean crust that is relatively young and hot enough but is still colliding with continental crust, then you can get "flat-slab" subduction [1]
Once the crust gets deeper in the mantle, eventually metamorphic phase transitions become the most important factor. In some seismic images, it looks like subducted slabs make it all the way to the core-mantle boundary (where they may contribute to the source of new mantle plumes).
For sure, I would love to have that simulation!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_slab_subduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_slab_subduction
- morphle 5y agoTo create that simulation I would need to team up with scientist who have enough credibility, reputation get the funding for programming that simulation (see my other comments on this thread). My part, the open source code would cost $25K to create. Collection and readying all the geology, all paleontology and part of biology science papers can partially be done with machine learning like Google's scholar search engine until you get a list of all relevant papers that humans must parse to find the timeline and spatial movements of rocks and materials we know about. A nice job for students. Still, it would be a cheap research project with big science returns like the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, Dark Energy Survey or Sloan Digital Sky Survey did for cosmology. Thank you for your answers, I now have a few weeks of science papers to read and follow up on.