This is better a
clear explanation for the actual initiation of plate tectonics. As far as Venus is concerned, I suspect that
it is just too early.
There is also erosion
transport that needs to be considered which also happens on the margins. That could also be enough to provide a nudge.
Yet we see gross
subsidence in the Rift Valley and gross upheaval and spreading in the mid-Atlantic
Ridge. That suggests much more.
Scientists
Unravel One Of The Keys To Life On Earth — And It's Right Beneath Your Feet
By Leslie Baehr |
An idealized version of the earliest plate tectonics. The blue
areas are the rigid plates. The red, yellow, and green areas are the
boundaries.
Scientists are constantly on a mission to untangle how Earth alone
among the planets was able to evolve complex life.
Scientists know that Earth's past internal movements of the
tectonic plates under our feet make our planet one-of-a-kind — they trapped
carbon dioxide which helped make our planet habitable.
A new study, published in the April
6 issue of the journal Nature, may have figured out the
mystery of how these plates formed — and why only Earth has them.
These are the Earth's major tectonic plates. The arrows show which
way the boundaries are moving.
Plates cover the entire Earth, and their boundaries play an
important role in geologic happenings. The movement of these plates atop a
thick, fluid "mantle" is known as plate tectonics and is the source
of earthquakes and volcanoes. Plates crash together to make mountains, such as
the Himalayas. They leave trenches where one slips beneath the other. They make
giant rift valleys and ridges when going their separate ways.
The process is actually very important to life on Earth. Several
billion years ago, the surface of our Earth began forming into puzzle pieces
called plates. This process trapped our atmospheric carbon dioxide into rocks
and stabilized our climate, making Earth habitable.
A Mylonite mystery
How this developed has been a mystery for centuries. But one
feature present at all plate boundaries could be the clue needed to crack the
mystery: a rock called mylonite.
Mylonite rocks show up at every plate boundary and have puzzled
scientists since at least the late 1800s.
"Their presence is a bit of a mystery," study researcher
David Bercovici, of Yale University, told Business Insider. "There are
well-known observations of mylonite at all different kinds of plate boundaries
and there's been a long debate about what causes them."
Mylonite from the Southern
Alps
Mylonite is a highly deformed rock, which makes it the size of a
small piece of grain. Small grain-size equals a weaker rock. Since these rocks
occur around all plate boundaries, their deformation and subsequent weakness
piqued Bercovici's interest.
"It was a big motivation for developing this theory in the
first place," said Bercovici who worked with Yankick Ricard of the Université de Lyon on
the study.
Using a set of laws to describe how grains evolve and "many
many pages of physics," Bercovici and Ricard were able to calculate how
the birth of plate tectonics may have come about. Bercovici began with the idea
that, back when Earth was just a ball of hot goo, certain parts of the
surface would become cooler than others and sink. These areas were called downwellings.
"You can see this happen in a cup of coffee or soup," he said.
Downwellings cause deformation of the sinking material as it bends
downward. In the globe to the right, the blue is a sinking area on the Earth's
surface, the beginnings of a plate boundary.
"The idea of our model
is that if I deform a rock, I'll actually make the grains smaller."
Smaller grains equal weaker rock and a weaker rock means it will more easily
succumb to future deformations.
This creates a feedback
loop where Earth's slowly cooling crust accumulates weak zones. "And you
accumulate enough of these weak zones and you'll eventually get plate
boundaries," he said.
In the globe to the right, the sinking from the red globe above
has created a convergent boundary — in blue — where plates move together. This
pulls on the rest of the Earth's surface, eventually forming a divergent
boundary — in red — where plates move away from each other. Once a piece of
Earth's surface is enclosed by boundaries, it becomes a moving plate.
On Venus, damaged areas of
the crust were never able accumulate into boundaries because it was too hot.
The weak zones healed relatively quickly and the planet was never able to
develop plate tectonics.
Venus' plates never trapped
CO2, never cooled, and the impact on the planet's atmosphere makes it
uninhabitable.
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