Our working title for the first MYRES is ``Heat, Helium, Hotspots, and Whole Mantle Convection''. We envision a re-investigation of the basic principles and assumptions upon which our conceptions of heat transport in the deep Earth are based. While this topic, in a broad sense, has been the subject of many meetings over the years, many first order issues still remain enigmatic. Especially the discussion about the origin of hotspots (deep seated plume, swell-fed, or crustal crack) has recently been reinvigorated by new seismologic findings. We have aimed to focus on a timely, broad, important, and multi-disciplinary problem which can nevertheless be treated in a short workshop. Our goal is to achieve a comprehensive and thorough understanding of the constraints that pertain to the problem, and hopefully identify promising potential solution strategies.
Because the spirit of the conference requires the keynote speakers to build the arguments from the ground up, we are likely to expose ``dirty little secrets'' and hidden assumptions that are not usually discussed. We will strive to compile a list of hard and soft constraints that will have to be considered for future models of heat transport and thermal evolution of the Earth. Rather than break the program into disciplines (e.g., Monday is seismology, Tuesday is geochemistry, etc.) we will break the program into basic questions, then ask what data or models can be used to address them.
For example, we can ask the fundamental question ``What is the thermal history of the Earth's core?'' Constraints come from a number of different fields. First, we can investigate the evidence that the Earth's magnetic field existed, and was basically di-polar, throughout most of Earth's history. The magnetic field requires a buoyancy source, either thermal or compositional. A consideration of the buoyancy source prompts a discussion of the age of the inner core, a question which may require some discussion of dynamo theory. Obvious trade-offs exist with potential concentrations of heat producing elements in the outer core. Addressing this issue requires an understanding of the partitioning of thorium, potassium, and uranium into the metal phase during core formation. This discussion then feeds back into considerations of the noble gas budget of the Earth.
After understanding the constraints on the heatflow out of the core, we can consider the modes of transport of heat through the mantle. For this, an understanding of thermal boundary layers, transport scaling, parameterized convection models, and fully self-consistent convection models with sophisticated rheologies is needed. A re-examination of the paradigm that there is a plate-scale mode of mantle convection, and that there is a plume-scale will be useful, and will lead to an estimation of the buoyancy flux as it is estimated from hotspot swells. Finally arriving at the surface, we can examine the role of elastic flexure and alternative explanation for hotspot tracks. For the mantle part of the problem, global and regional constraints for the actual structure comes from seismology, and we will explore uncertainties in the techniques and the interpretation of velocity anomalies.
This back-and-forth between the disciplines will require a great deal of coordination between the presenters. We see this as one of the great challenges and potential benefits of this conference; the cooperative effort of assembling the keynotes will foster new lines of communication and greater inter-disciplinary understanding.
The themes for each of the four days with preliminary assignments of speakers are:
A preliminary list of the major questions and sub-questions that ties these themes together and will have to be addressed follows.
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wave
models