Fall 2010 Colloquium Abstracts - Allen McNamara

October 6, 2010

Understanding Large Scale Mantle Convection

Allen McNamara (Arizona State University)

Over the past several decades, the geoscience community has made great strides toward understanding the kinematics and local dynamical processes associated with plate tectonics. Convection of the Earth’s silicate mantle is qualitatively regarded as the primary driving force for tectonic processes; however, the manner in which this integrated system operates remains fundamentally unclear. A critical obstacle is our lack of understanding the first-order, dynamical nature of mantle convection. Several conceptual models regarding large-scale mantle convection are currently being debated, each having significantly different implications for heat and mass transport within Earth’s interior. Numerical modeling of mantle convection provides a powerful tool to explore the dynamical feasibility of particular hypotheses and to provide observational predictions that can be tested by geophysical methods. This presentation will review recent progress toward discovering the nature of large-scale mantle convection within Earth’s interior.