CAPTION - Supercontinent Aggregation and Dispersal

Supercontinent Aggregation and Dispersal.

This movie shows what could potentially happen in the Earth's mantle as a large supercontinent moves around the surface. The non-subsubducting continent is shown by the green bar across the top. Cool mantle is in blue while hot mantle is in yellow. In the computer model, heat builds up beneath the continent and generates large tensile stresses in the over-riding plate. The continental plate then fails and the two peices go off in different directions.

This animation is now very old and was designed to accompany a classic paper which appeared as an article in Nature in 1988. The computer simulation, carried out on the Cray-XMP, at the then San Diego Supercoputer Center, was the very first model of convection interacting with plates and it was one of the first movies ever made of a mantle convection model. In fact, this animation was first made on 16 mm file. Over the years it was transfered to video and later the video was digitized as an MPEG clip which you now see here.

To view our animation again, press here.

Reference

Gurnis, M. Large-scale mantle convection and the aggregation and dispersal of supercontinents, Nature 332, 695-699, 1988.

Additional references of related material can be found here.

Convection Movies Geodynamics Home | People | Projects | GPlates