We present a series of 2D thermo-mechanical numerical experiments thick-skinned crustal extension including pre-rift salt horizon and subsequent thin-, thick-skinned, or mixed styles convergence accompanied by surface processes. Extension localization along steep basement faults produces half-graben structures leads to variations in the original distribution salt. Thick-skinned rate rheology co...

Plate tectonics is largely responsible for material and heat circulation in Earth, but for unknown reasons it does not exist on Venus. The strength of planetary materials is a key control on plate tectonics because physical properties, such as temperature, pressure, stress, and chemical composition, result in strong rheological layering and convection in planetary interiors. Our deformation exp...

The realization that Earth may have lost heat more slowly in the past than at present has motivated the search for mechanisms to reduce the efficiency of plate tectonics in the past. Several mechanisms have been proposed, such as the resistance to subduction of thick plates (1) produced by deeper melting at higher mantle temperatures (2). We (3) proposed an alternative mechanism, namely subduct...

The evolution of Mars has been greatly influenced by temporal changes in its rheological structure, which may explain the difference in tectonics between Mars and Earth. Some previous studies have shown the rheological structures of Mars calculated from the flow law of rocks and the predicted thermal structure. However, the Peierls mechanism, which is the dominant deformation mechanism at relat...

Apersistent seismic gap is hypothesized in the Pollino area (southern Italy), at the boundary between the Apennines and the Calabrian arc. Presently, seismic swarms are active in the gap area, creating concerns for possible future large earthquakes. In this study, we model the deep Earth structure across the Pollino range to give new insights on the kinematics and tectonics of this enigmatic ar...

Plate tectonics is a kinematic description of Earth that treats the outer shell of its mantle as a number of plates or rigid spherical caps that move with respect to each other (see the “Plate tectonics” sidebar). The mantle is the outer, solid 3,000-km-thick shell that overlies Earth’s fluid outer core. An enormous amount of geological and geophysical data has gone into determining the motion ...

The facies changes, tectonics and magmatism across the Triassic–Jurassic boundary in the southern Tethyan margin have been studied in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia and Jordan an unconformable contact is recognized between the Upper Triassic and Lower Jurassic rocks. This unconformity surface is marked by the truncation of the fluvial clastics of the uppermost Triassic b...

[1] The net influx of water into the deep mantle by plate tectonics has been poorly constrained because it is difficult to quantify how efficiently subducting slabs are devolatilized on a global scale. The significance of deep water cycle in the Earth history is similarly ambiguous because it depends critically on when plate tectonics started and how it evolved through time. Here I show that, u...

We use 1-D thermal history models and 3-D numerical experiments to study the impact of dynamic thermal disequilibrium and large temporal variations of normal and shear stresses on the initiation of plate tectonics. Previous models that explored plate tectonics initiation from a steady state, single plate mode of convection concluded that normal stresses govern the initiation of plate tectonics,...

Metamorphic core complexes (MCCs) are a product of crustal extension, but their dynamics still debated. Early research suggests that the formation MCCs in western United States was due to gravitational collapse crust had been thickened during Cordilleran orogenesis. However, instability overthickened alone cannot explain diachronous with strong spatial dependency, as there relatively uniform th...