Improving reconstructions of the Pacific Ocean’s tectonic past
Reconstructing plate tectonics of the past is challenging, particularly in what is now the Pacific Ocean (formerly Panthalassa) along northeast Asia during the Mesozoic-Cenozoic eras. This is because more than 90% of the region’s oceanic crust has been subducted into Earth’s interior. A team of scientists improved the fit between modeled and real measurements of Earth’s topography by up to 25% by including plate subduction within the ocean into a model of heat and rock movement in the mantle. The model suggests that some island arcs in the northwest Pacific came from subduction zones within the Pacific-Panthalassa ocean and that slabs within the Pacific lower mantle originally subducted thousands of kilometers away from their current locations.
NW Pacific-Panthalassa Intra-Oceanic Subduction During Mesozoic Times From Mantle Convection and Geoid Models,
Yi-An Lin, Lorenzo Colli, Jonny Wu [2022] Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems
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