Geoscientists have become used to thinking of the Earth as being dominated by plate tectonics in which large, rigid plates of lithosphere move across the surface. They are driven mainly by the sinking of cold, densified lithosphere in slabs at subduction zones. The volume of recycled slabs is replaced by continual supply of mafic magma to form oceanic crust at constructive margins. Such a process has long been considered to have reached far back into the Precambrian past and there are lively debates concerning when this modus operandi first arose and what preceded it. Now that we know more about other rocky planets and moons it appears that Earth is the only one on which plate tectonics has occurred. The other, more common, behaviour is dominated by stagnancy, although some worlds evidence volcanism and resurfacing as a result of giant impacts. Their subdued activity has come to be known as ‘lid tectonics’, in which their highly viscous innards slowly convect beneath a rigid, stagnant lid through which thermal energy is lost by convection: they are ‘one-plate’ systems. Although Earth loses internal heat by conduction through plate interiors, a large amount dissipates by convection associated with constructive margins: the oceanic parts of its plates lose heat laterally, as they grow older. Six papers in an advance, online issue of the free-access journal Geoscience Frontiers are concerned with the issue of terrestrial lid-tectonics and whether or not it dominated the Earth repeatedly in its Precambrian history.
A model is emerging for a hot, early Earth that was dominated by a form of lid tectonics (Bédard, J.H. 2018 Stagnant lids and mantle overturns: implications for Archaean tectonics, magmagenesis, crustal growth, mantle evolution, and the start of plate tectonics. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, 19-49; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.01.005). Bedard’s model centres on lithosphere that was so weak because of its temperature that its subduction was impossible. Density of the lithosphere rarely increased above that of the mantle because the necessary mineralogical changes were not achieved – those involved in plate tectonics require low-temperature, high-pressure metamorphism as oceanic lithosphere is driven down at modern subduction zones. Even if such reactions did happen, the lithosphere would have been too weak to sustain slab-pull force and dense lithosphere would have simply ‘dripped’ back to the mantle. Mantle convection in a hotter Earth would have been in the form of large, long-lived upwelling zones rather than the relatively ephemeral and narrow plumes known today. Low density materials resulting from magma fractionation, the precursors of continental crust, would have been shifted willy-nilly across the face of the planet to collide. accrete and undergo repeated partial melting. In Bedard’s view, plate tectonics arose as Earth’s heat production waned below a threshold that permitted rigid lithosphere, probably in the late Archaean, to dominate after 2.5 Ga.
Bédard’s impression of an early Archaean lid-tectonic scenario. (credit: Jean H Bédard 2018, Figure 3B)
A radically different view is that stagnant-lid episodes alternated with periods of limited subduction and plate tectonics in the Archaean. Some Archaean cratons – the so-called ‘granite-greenstone terrains – seems to provide geological evidence for lid tectonics (Wyman, D. 2018. Do cratons preserve evidence of stagnant lid tectonics? Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, 19-49; https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.02.001). Others, such as the famous Isua supracrustal belt in West Greenland hint at plate tectonics. John Piper, of Liverpool University in Britain, argues from a series of Archaean palaeomagnetic polar wander curves that in three periods – ~2650 to 2200 Ma, 1550 to 1250 Ma, and 800 to 600 Ma – the poles shifted comparatively slowly with respect to the cratons providing the magnetic data; a feature that Piper ascribes to dominant lid tectonics (Piper, J.D.A., 2018. Dominant Lid Tectonics behaviour of continental lithosphere in Precambrian Times: palaeomagnetism confirms prolonged quasi-integrity and absence of Supercontinent Cycles. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 61-89; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.07.009). Similarly, there is some evidence based on the geochemical variation of basaltic rocks derived from the mantle. Through the Archaean, geochemical changes roughly follow cycles in the abundance of zircon radiometric ages and other geological changes that may reflect plate- and lid-tectonic episodes (Condie, K.C. 2018. A planet in transition: the onset of plate tectonics on Earth between 3 and 2 Ga? Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 51-60; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2016.09.001). Interestingly, the age-frequency plot of almost three thousand Archaean and Hadean zircons recovered from the famous 1.6 Ga old sandstones of the Jack Hills Formation in Western Australia reveals similar cycles that may reflect such tectonic fluctuations in the Hadean (Wang, Q. & Wilde, S.A. 2017. New constraints on the Hadean to Proterozoic history of the Jack Hills belt,Western Australia. Gondwana Research, v. 55, p. 74-91; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2017.11.008). Since zircons are most likely to crystallize from intermediate and felsic magmas – i.e. precursors of continental material – their abundance in the Jack Hills rocks suggests that their source must have been in the 3.7 to 3.3 Ga gneisses on which the younger sediments rest. That is, part of those Archaean gneisses may well be made up of Hadean continental material that was repeatedly reworked and maybe remelted since such crust first appeared (in the form of surviving zircons) around 4.4 to 4.5 Ga, perhaps during vigorous lid-tectonic regimes.
Possible evolution of magmatic and tectonic styles for large silicate planets. (Credit: Stern et al. 2018, Figure 3)
Based on their reassessment of tectonic activity revealed by 8 rocky planets and moons Robert Stern of the University of Texas (Dallas) and colleagues from ETH-Zurich suggest a possible evolutionary sequence of tectonics and magmatism that Earth-like bodies might go through (Stern, R.J. et al. 2018. Stagnant lid tectonics: Perspectives from silicate planets, dwarf planets, large moons, and large asteroids. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 103-119 ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.06.004). In their scheme plate tectonics requires certain conditions of lithospheric density and strength to evolve and suggest that, depending on planetary characteristics, slab-pull driven tectonics is likely to be preceded and followed by stagnant lid tectonics, to give perhaps a cyclical geotectonic history.
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