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Thermal or compositional fluid-dynamical plumes produced in that way were presented as models for the much larger postulated mantle plumes. Based on these experiments, mantle plumes are now postulated to comprise two parts: a long thin conduit connecting the top of the plume to its base, and a bulbous head that expands in size as the plume rises.
The mantle's composition has changed through the Earth's history due to the extraction of magma that solidified to form oceanic crust and continental crust. It has also been proposed in a 2018 study that an exotic form of water known as ice VII can form from supercritical water in the mantle when diamonds containing pressurized water bubbles ...
The formation and development of plumes in the early mantle contributed to triggering the lateral movement of crust across the Earth's surface. [18] The effect of upwelling mantle plumes on the lithosphere can be seen today through local depressions around hotspots such as Hawaii. The scale of this impact is much less than that exhibited in the ...
Mantle plumes were first proposed by J. Tuzo Wilson in 1963 [4] [non-primary source needed] and further developed by W. Jason Morgan in 1971. A mantle plume is posited to exist where hot rock nucleates [clarification needed] at the core-mantle boundary and rises through the Earth's mantle becoming a diapir in the Earth's crust. [5]
The figure is a schematic diagram depicting a subduction zone. The subduction slab on the right enters the mantle with a varying temperature gradient while importing water in a downward motion. A model of the subducting Farallon slab under North America. In geology, the slab is a significant constituent of subduction zones. [1]
Mantle convection is the very slow creep of Earth's solid silicate mantle as convection currents carry heat from the interior to the planet's surface. [2] [3] Mantle convection causes tectonic plates to move around the Earth's surface. [4] The Earth's lithosphere rides atop the asthenosphere, and the two form the components of the upper mantle ...
Second, flow of hot mantle material encounters the base of the thin lithosphere and often results in melting and a new phase of volcanism. Delamination may thus account for some volcanic regions that have been attributed to mantle plumes in the past. [6]
Conventional plate-tectonic hypotheses differ in detail, but since the 1980s most have assumed that Earth has operated in a plate-tectonic mode, with plume-based whole-mantle convection driven by an eternally hot core, for at least 3 b.y., and that this convection has kept the mantle stirred and mostly unfractionated.