Hawaiian-Emperor undersea mystery revealed with supercomputers utaustin NatureGeosci
A team of scientists have now used supercomputers allocated by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment to model and reconstruct the dynamics of Pacific tectonic plate motion that might explain the mysterious mountain chain bend."We've shown with computer models for the first time how the Pacific plate can abruptly change direction from the north to the west," said Michael Gurnis, professor of Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology.
But the volcanos of Hawaii and the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain weren't caused by this process. Instead, scientists theorize that plumes of Earth's hottest rock, from its core, travel upward through the mantle to generate a volcanic hotspot. And it's theorized that the seamount chain was created by the plate moving over the hot plume, something like a trail of burn marks on a paper moved over a candle.
"Moreover, earlier work with Müller, Gurnis and others showed how the physics of plumes could work inside the mantle such that the you could have a plume which rapidly migrated to the south and then stopped at 50 million years ago," Gurnis said. XSEDE allocations on TACC's Stampede2 ; and also the NSF-funded Frontera supercomputer were used in the plate tectonics modeling study. Credit: TACCThe challenge of getting both of those pieces of physics computed simultaneously meant that they needed computational methods that can handle vast changes in the mechanical properties from one plate to another plate as well as their faults.
When they put the zones in the models, they discovered that they could make the Pacific plate go to the north. And when that subduction terminated, the Pacific plate started to move to the west, slowly building up other subduction zones that over time provided more force to pull the Pacific plate.
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