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Abstract Pacific‐Panthalassa plate tectonics are the most challenging on Earth to reconstruct during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras due to extensive subduction, which has resulted in large (>9,000 km length) unconstrained gaps between the Pacific and Laurasia (now NE Asia) back to the Early Jurassic. We build four contrasted NW Pacific‐Panthalassa global plate reconstructions and assimilate their velocity fields into global geodynamic models. We compare our predicted present mantle structure, synthetic geoid and dynamic topography to Earth observations. P‐wave tomographic filtering of predicted mantle structures allows for more explicit comparisons to global tomography. Plate reconstructions that include intra‐oceanic subduction in NW Pacific‐Panthalassa fit better to the observed geoid and residual topography, challenging popular models of Andean‐style subduction along East Asia. Our geodynamic models predict significant SE‐ward lateral slab advections within the NW Pacific basin lower mantle (∼2,500 km from Mesozoic times to present) that would confound “vertical slab sinking”‐style restorations of imaged slabs and past subduction zone locations.
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Linking deep-time subduction history to modern day expressions of dynamic topography
Dynamic topography refers to vertical deflections of Earth’s surface from viscous flow within the mantle. Here we investigate how past subduction history affects present dynamic topography. We assimilate two plate reconstructions into TERRA forward mantle convection models to calculate past mantle states and predict Earth’s present dynamic topography; a comparison is made with a database of observed oceanic residual topography. The two assimilated plate reconstructions ‘Earthbyte’ and ‘Tomopac’ show divergent subduction histories across an extensive deep-time interval within Pacific-Panthalassa. We find that introducing an alternative subduction history perturbs our modelled present-day dynamic topography on the same order as the choice of radial viscosity. Additional circum-Pacific intra-oceanic subduction in Tomopac consistently produces higher correlations to the geoid (more than 20% improvement). At spherical harmonic degrees 1–40, dynamic topography models with intra-oceanic subduction produce universally higher correlations with observations and improve fit by up to 37%. In northeast Asia, Tomopac models show higher correlations (0.46 versus 0.18) to observed residual topography and more accurately predict approximately 1 km of dynamic subsidence within the Philippine Sea plate. We demonstrate that regional deep-time changes in subduction history have widespread impacts on the spatial distribution and magnitude of present-day dynamic topography. Specifically, we find that local changes to plate motion histories can induce dynamic topography changes in faraway regions located thousands of kilometres away. Our results affirm that present-day residual topography observations provide a powerful, additional constraint for reconstructing ancient subduction histories.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2422671
- PAR ID:
- 10571141
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Royal Society UK
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Volume:
- 480
- Issue:
- 2301
- ISSN:
- 1364-5021
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2024.0254
