That, he says, gives us a first-order estimate of when plate tectonics will end. Upwelling mantle plumes can sometimes appear beneath continental or oceanic slabs, and this ever-moving center of melting creates chains of volcanoes.Īt some point, though, the mantle will cool to such an extent that the slabs can no longer sink into it, and several studies have attempted to predict when this will transpire.Ĭheng’s new paper uses mathematical models to estimate how fast the mantle is cooling, based on what we know about the intensity of the planet’s magmatic activity from three billion years ago to now. When two continental slabs collide, they buckle, and mountain ranges like the Alps or the Himalaya form. Plate tectonics have shuffled the earth’s landmasses around-and continue to do so. This activity generates explosive volcanoes and fresh crust at the surface. They usually dive beneath a less dense oceanic or continental plate in a process known as subduction. The colder and denser edges of the slabs help pull this lithospheric plate away from these ridges and down into the depths.
( Meet the next supercontinent, Pangaea Proxima.)Īt mid-ocean ridges, mantle material rises, decompresses, and triggers profuse melting, creating oceanic lithosphere. The lithosphere became divided into a jigsaw puzzle of plates that are constantly jostling across the planet’s surface, driving geological action above and below the oceans. As the planet cooled, Earth settled into its current layered structure, with a dense inner iron core, a liquid outer core, and a brittle upper mantle and crust sandwiching the hot, plastic-like rock of the lower mantle.Īnywhere between 600 million and 3.5 billion years ago, slabs made of the crust and upper mantle–collectively known as the lithosphere–became cold and dense enough to be able to sink into the lower mantle, kicking off the era of plate tectonics. Once entirely molten, the heat generated by its formation and radioactive materials in the rock began to escape. Earth was born 4.54 billion years ago in the pyres of the early solar system. So, what will our home world be like when those major planetary processes give up the ghost? Tectonic Jigsawįiguring that out means first understanding how plate tectonics work. But scientists largely agree that such an end will arrive one day, putting Earth on a path to a geologic standstill. The study, published this month in Gondwana Research, has provoked controversy, and some experts argue that we can never accurately predict the end of plate tectonics. This photo originally published in “ The Larsen C Ice Shelf Collapse Is Just the Beginning-Antarctica Is Melting.” Photograph by Camille Seaman The continent’s coastal ice is crumbling as the sea and air around it warm. (Here’s why tardigrades may be the only life-forms that survive until the world’s end.)Ī startling sunset reddens the Lemaire Channel, off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. That’s well before the sun is expected to swell into a red giant and consume us in its death throes roughly 5.4 billion years from now. He calculates that the shutdown will arrive in about 1.45 billion years.
Quiming Cheng, a mathematical geoscientist and president of the International Union of Geological Sciences, is the latest to take on the prophetic role of predicting when this bleak day may arrive.
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At that point, you can say farewell to the carbon cycle, as well as the constant reshaping and reshuffling of landmasses that have been big drivers of evolution over eons. Thanks to this ongoing operation, we have mountains and oceans, terrifying earthquakes, incandescent volcanic eruptions, and new land being born every single second.Įventually, the mantle will cool to such an extent that this planetwide conveyor belt will grind to a halt. There’s no geological artist quite like Earth’s plate tectonics.
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