Abstract
One outstanding problem of great geophysical importance is the vertical extent of convection in the Earth's mantle1. Steady-state models of convection in the mantle have yet to produce a description of the mantle which is consistent with geochemical and geophysical observations. Here we present time-dependent numerical models of two-dimensional convection which simulate mantle convection. Starting from a fluid initially at rest with a purely conductive temperature profile, we now find that for a Rayleigh number (Ra) of 107, the model experiences a transient period of double-layer convection, which lasts on the order of hundreds of millions of years when scaled to the Earth's mantle. It is suggested that transient periods of double-layer convection in the Earth's mantle may have existed in the past, whether or not such a period exists today.
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Boss, A., Sacks, I. Time-dependent models of single- and double-layer mantle convection. Nature 308, 533–535 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/308533a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/308533a0
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