What is it about?
The strength of continents on which human beings live is controlled by the mechanical behavior of quartz under natural conditions. Despite several decades of investigation, this behavior remains poorly understood because past experimental works designed to resolve the problem yield inconsistent results. This paper shows that the main reason for such inconsistency is because an important factor, namely the activation volume, was overlooked. This paper re-examined past experimental data, considered the activation volume factor, and produced a consistent description of the mechanical behavior for continents.
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Why is it important?
An accurate description of continent mechanical behavior leads to better understanding of Earth in response to plate tectonics and improves our physical models for earthquake, volcanos etc.
Perspectives
The topic of this paper arose from the 2016 graduate course Flow of Rocks in Crust and Mantle I taught at Western. One assignment of the course was to construct a strength profile for continental crust that best fit current experimental data. I had the pleasure of writing this paper with my PhD student Lucy X Lu and hope the idea here will facilitate more exciting research on the mechanics of Earth deformation.
Dazhi Jiang
Western University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Quartz flow law revisited: the significance of pressure dependence of the activation enthalpy, Journal of Geophysical Research Solid Earth, December 2018, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2018jb016226.
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