Earth's internal heat budget in the context of "Continental drift"

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⭐ Core Definition: Earth's internal heat budget

Earth's internal heat budget is fundamental to the thermal history of the Earth. The flow of heat from Earth's interior to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts (TW) and comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.

Earth's internal heat travels along geothermal gradients and powers most geological processes. It drives mantle convection, plate tectonics, mountain building, rock metamorphism, and volcanism. Convective heat transfer within the planet's high-temperature metallic core is also theorized to sustain a geodynamo which generates Earth's magnetic field.

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👉 Earth's internal heat budget in the context of Continental drift

Continental drift is a highly supported scientific theory, originating in the early 20th century, stating that Earth's continents move or drift relative to each other over geologic time. The theory of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.

The speculation that continents might have "drifted" was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. A pioneer of the modern view of mobilism was the Austrian geologist Otto Ampferer. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in his 1915 publication, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans". However, at that time his hypothesis was rejected by many, largely because there was no known geological mechanism which could propel such massive movements. In 1931, the English geologist Arthur Holmes proposed mantle convection for that mechanism, which is now known to be powered by radioactive decay and primordial heat and a much smaller amount of heat from tidal heating.

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Earth's internal heat budget in the context of Mantle convection

Mantle convection is the very slow creep of Earth's solid silicate mantle as convection currents carry heat from the interior to the planet's surface. Mantle convection causes tectonic plates to move around the Earth's surface.

The Earth's lithosphere rides atop the asthenosphere, and the two form the components of the upper mantle. The lithosphere is divided into tectonic plates that are continuously being created or consumed at plate boundaries. Accretion occurs as mantle is added to the growing edges of a plate, associated with seafloor spreading. Upwelling beneath the spreading centers is a shallow, rising component of mantle convection and in most cases not directly linked to the global mantle upwelling. The hot material added at spreading centers cools down by conduction and convection of heat as it moves away from the spreading centers. At the consumption edges of the plate, the material has thermally contracted to become dense, and it sinks under its own weight in the process of subduction usually at an oceanic trench. Subduction is the descending component of mantle convection.

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Continental drift ← Mantle convection ← Continental drift theory
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
Mid-ocean ridge → Thermal history of the Earth → Terawatt → Radioactive decay → Earth → Geothermal gradient → Mantle convection → Plate tectonics → Orogeny → Metamorphism → Volcanism → Convective heat transfer → Earth's core → Geodynamo → Earth's magnetic field →