Structure and dynamics of the oceanic lithosphere-asthenosphere system

A New Reference Model for the Evolution of Oceanic Lithosphere in a Cooling Earth

“…Richards et al. (2020), for example, used the anelastic parameterization of Yamauchi and Takei (2016) to compare half‐space cooling and plate models against SL2013, SEMum2, and one more tomographic model (CAM2016; Ho et al., 2016); their results seem to indicate that SEMum2 and CAM2016 are consistent with half‐space cooling and plate models, respectively, and SL2013 is somewhere in‐between. Richards et al.…”

“…As mentioned above, examining the deeper part of those models is more difficult because correcting for the effect of attenuation is model-dependent. Richards et al (2020), for example, used the anelastic parameterization of Yamauchi and Takei (2016) to compare half-space cooling and plate models against SL2013, SEMum2, and one more tomographic model (CAM2016; Ho et al, 2016); their results seem to indicate that SEMum2 and CAM2016 are consistent with half-space cooling and plate models, respectively, and SL2013 is somewhere in-between. Richards et al (2020), however, calibrated the anelastic parameters for each of these different tomographic models, and some of the calibrated parameters vary substantially among models (see their Table F3).…”

“…Richards et al (2020), for example, used the anelastic parameterization of Yamauchi and Takei (2016) to compare half-space cooling and plate models against SL2013, SEMum2, and one more tomographic model (CAM2016; Ho et al, 2016); their results seem to indicate that SEMum2 and CAM2016 are consistent with half-space cooling and plate models, respectively, and SL2013 is somewhere in-between. Richards et al (2020), however, calibrated the anelastic parameters for each of these different tomographic models, and some of the calibrated parameters vary substantially among models (see their Table F3). This is equivalent to assuming different versions of viscoelasticity for different tomographic models, suggesting considerable incompatibilities among those published tomographic images with respect to the lithosphere-asthenosphere system.…”

Continental lithospheric temperatures: A review

“…For much of the lithosphere, one-dimensional solutions to the equation for heat transfer (Supplement) that consider just vertical heat conduction are good approximations because vertical thermal gradients tend to be much larger than horizontal ones apart from near steps in lithospheric thickness. For oceanic lithosphere, solutions that balance vertical conduction with horizontal advection due to plate spreading provide very good thermal reference models [Richards et al, 2020].…”

“…In this paper and another contribution in this issue [Richards et al, 2020], we review the geodynamic, surface and petrological constraints on thermal structure of the continental and oceanic lithosphere, respectively. In the following, we discuss commonly used thermal models for the continental lithosphere and the observations they are based on as well as how new observations and techniques are leading to revised thermal models and new insights into how the thermal structure of continental lithosphere evolved.…”