Origin of plate tectonics: Grain-damage, inheritance and hysteresis

Abstract:

The emergence of plate tectonics is enigmatic because of the lack of observations in the early Archean as well as the challenge of understanding how plates form. The damage theory of lithospheric weakening by grain-reduction provides a physical framework for plate generation. This model builds on grain-scale physics to describe planetary-scale processes, and is consistent with lab and field observations of polycrystalline rocks and lithospheric mylonites. Grain-damage accounts for the evolution of damage and healing by grain growth, hence predicts plate boundary formation and longevity, and how they depend on surface conditions. The establishment of global plate tectonics likely started between >4Ga and 2.7Ga, and may have taken over a billion years to develop. Under Earth-like conditions, grain-damage combined with intermittent Archean protosubduction produces persistent weak zones that accumulate into well developed plates by 3Ga. However, Venus' hotter surface promotes healing, suppresses damage and inhibits weak zone accumulation, which suggests why plate tectonics failed to spread on our sister planet. New work posits that interface damage is possibly suppressed at moderate grain-size; this induces a hysteresis loop wherein three equilibrium deformation branches coexist. These branches include a stable large-grain, weakly-deforming state in dislocation creep, a stable small-grain rapidly-deforming state in diffusion creep analogous to mylonites, and an unstable intermediate-grain state. At the right conditions, a lithosphere can acquire two stable deformation states characteristic of plate tectonics; i.e., both slowly deforming plate interiors and rapidly deforming plate boundaries can co-exist. Earth currently sits inside the hysteresis loop and can have coexisting deformation states, while Venus sits at the end of the loop where only the weakly deforming branch dominates. The hot post-Hadean Earth might have had peak deformation only on the weakly-deforming branch. However, with surface cooling, diffuse deformation zones could be de-stabilized toward the mylonitic, rapidly-deforming branch and thus transform into localized plate-boundaries. Thus the Earth’s initial surface cooling may itself have facilitated a bifurcation to a plate-tectonic state.