- 著者
-
岩森 光
- 出版者
- 特定非営利活動法人 日本火山学会
- 雑誌
- 火山 (ISSN:04534360)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.61, no.1, pp.1-22, 2016-03-31 (Released:2017-03-20)
- 被引用文献数
-
1
Earth’s mantle constitutes the largest sub-system of the whole Earth system, involving 70% of the total mass, ~80% of the heat capacity, and more than 50% of the internal heat generation by radioactive decay. Therefore, the mantle and the inherited dynamics may control the whole system to a great extent, e.g., in terms of convective motion (including plate motion as its surface expression) and heat transport from the core to the surface, regulating the core cooling and dynamo that eventually affects the surface environment and life. First the basic structures and dynamics of the mantle convection are described, which demonstrate that the surface cooling dominantly drives the convection, creating buoyancy of several to 10 times greater than that generated near the core-mantle boundary. This estimate for the much larger role of near-surface cooling is consistent with the seismic tomography. Then various types of observations on the structures and dynamics of mantle, particularly three boundary layers (i.e., the near-surface, mid-mantle around 660km discontinuity, and core-mantle boundary) have been reviewed and are compared with the simple estimation. Of these, the ’geochemical probe’ approach, which utilizes composition (in particular the isotopic composition) of young basalts that fingerprint geochemical nature of the mantle materials, has been reviewed in conjunction with convective regimes. The latest result of high spatial resolution has revealed that the mantle can be divided into the eastern and western hemispheres, in terms of an anciently (several hundred million years ago) subducted fluid-component. The spatial pattern is strikingly similar to the hemispherical seismic structure of the inner core. Based on these observations, a model for ‘top-down hemispherical dynamics’ is introduced, as a result of focused subduction towards the supercontinents that existed mostly in the eastern hemisphere from ~900 to 250 million years ago (i.e., Rodinia, Gondwana and Pangea). The cooled domain of mantle may absorb heat from the eastern hemisphere of the core, resulting in faster growth and velocity of the eastern half of the inner core. Such ‘top-down’ dynamics is consistent with the various types observations and arguments (made in the first half of this paper) on mantle convection.