About this book
Debating the premises of Hurley and Rand versus those of Armstrong on the formation of continents, scientists gathered in a special session of the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Toronto in October to discuss "Continent Formation, Growth and Recycling". Twenty-four talks were presented, ten of which have been developed into papers published in this special issue of "Tectonophysics". The papers are grouped by subdiscipline: Ogawa, de Smet et al., Schott et al., and Regenauer-Lieb and Yuen present numerical models of asthenospheric melting and convection and lithospheric break-up and delamination. Green et al., Krapez et al., and Henry et al. report geologic geochronologic, geochemical and isotopic data for some key Archean cratonic terranes. Condie, Abbott et al., and Vlaar discuss global models for crustal growth, emphasizing episodic magmatism, crustal and lithospheric thickness, and crustal isostasy, respectively. Readers of the entire special issue will see that a definitive answer to the overall question of continental growth rates has not been reached, but that much progress is being made on understanding the processes involved in continent development.
Contents
Continent formation, growth and recycling (P.J. Sylvester). Coupled magmatism--mantle convection system with variable viscosity (M. Ogawa). Early formation and long-term stability of continents resulting from decompression melting in a convecting mantle (J. De Smet, A.P. Van den Berg, N.J. Vlaar). The diversity of tectonics from fluid-dynamical modeling of the lithosphere--mantle system (B. Schott, D.A. Yuen, H. Schmeling). Fast mechanisms for the formation of new plate boundaries (K. Regenauer-Lieb, D.A. Yuen). Growth and recycling of early Archaean continental crust: geochemical evidence from the Coonterunah and Warrawoona Groups, Pilbara Craton, Australia (M.G. Green, P.J. Sylvester, R. Buick). Age constraints on recycled crustal and supracrustal sources of Archaean metasedimentary sequences, Eastern Goldfields Province, Western Australia: evidence from SHRIMP zircon dating (B. Krapez, S.J.A. Brown, J. Hand, M.E. Barley, R.A.F. Cas). Nd isotopic evidence for Early to Late Archean (3.4--2.7 Ga) crustal growth in the Western Superior Province (Ontario, Canada)(P. Henry, R.K. Stevenson, Y. Larbi, C. Gariepy). Episodic continental growth models: afterthoughts and extensions (K.C. Condie). Quantifying Precambrian crustal extraction: the root is the answer (D. Abbott, D. Sparks, C. Herzberg, W. Mooney, A. Nikishin, Yu Shen Zhang). Continental emergence and growth on a cooling earth (N.J. Vlaar).
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