Sentences with phrase «dense subducting»

Once the movement has begun, it is perpetuated due to the weight of the dense subducting plate.

Not exact matches

For the most part, today's subducting slabs can only sink so far, to about 670 kilometers below the surface, before the mantle's makeup turns from a honey - like consistency, to that of paste — too dense for most slabs to penetrate further.

«We find that around 3 billion years ago, subducted slabs would have remained more dense than the surrounding mantle, even in the transition zone, and there's no reason from a buoyancy standpoint why slabs should get stuck there.

The combination of a hotter mantle and denser rocks likely caused subducting plates to sink all the way to the bottom of the mantle, 2,800 kilometers below the surface, forming a «graveyard» of slabs atop the Earth's core.

However, it must be borne in mind that the MOC can also include shallower, wind - driven overturning cells such as occur in the upper ocean in the tropics and subtropics, in which warm (light) waters moving poleward are transformed to slightly denser waters and subducted equatorward at deeper levels.