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Autobiography: A 50-Year Quest for Understanding in Geoscience



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
  • Personal Author:
    Molnar, Peter
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences)
  • Description:
    Readers will be led down a random path from continental dynamics to paleoclimate. A key to understanding continental dynamics is recognizing that differences in gravitational potential energy per unit area between high and low terrain govern much of large-scale continental deformation. Removal of mantle lithosphere, not just crustal thickening, plays a crucial, but difficult-to-test, role in changes in surface elevation. Although measuring past surface heights remains a challenge, indications of such processes suggest that surface uplift associated with such removal can affect relative plate motion. Climate change, from a warmer to cooler climate, and associated changes in erosion and sedimentation introduce further complications to determining past elevations. The phenomena that led to such cooling include a number of possibilities, but I favor the emergence of islands in the Maritime continent, which transformed the Pacific Ocean from one with a warm eastern tropical Pacific, as during El Niño events, to the present-day La Niña–like background state. Teleconnections from the eastern tropical Pacific to Canada affect the duration of summers and the potential of high-latitude ice to accumulate. ▪Lateral gradients in gravitational potential energy per unit area (GPE), a force per unit length, govern large-scale continental dynamics.▪Removal of mantle lithosphere and thickening of crust raise GPE; knowledge of mean surface elevations provides a test of these processes.▪Climate change from a warmer to cooler climate and from one with less to more erosion can give the false impression of elevation change.▪Emergence of Indonesian islands, more rain over them, a stronger Walker Circulation, and cooler eastern Pacific may have led to ice ages.
  • Source:
    Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 52(1), 1-19
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    0084-6597 ; 1545-4495
  • Format:
    pdf
  • Publisher:
    Annual Reviews
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • License:
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:f3d5ea3e59b19f624c7eead9eacf8c06f4992c32d429accbcf715100c264786d7d87a9ba90276825b0733214867387c30d6cee0c78edaa356ac218c9bd058890
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 3.30 MB ]
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