(1) Department of Geology and
Geophysics and Minnesota Supercomputing
Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN USA
(2) Department of Geology, Colby
College, Waterville, ME USA
(3) Unite Mixte de
Recherche, CNRS, Toulouse, France
(4) Department of Geophysics,
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech
Republic
Plume dynamics has been emerging as an exciting topic. While the mechanisms that govern the behavior of mantle plumes are not completely understoond, continued modelling has lead to some insight on their complex nature. The idea of secondary instabilities being generated from mantle plumes has come from recent numerical modeling of high Rayleigh number convection by Vincent and Yuen (2000). Prior investigations by Skilbeck and Whitehead (1978) have been able to generate secondary instabilities in laboratory settings. This poster will examine secondary instabilities generated through numerical modeling in two dimensions. Very recent investigations conducted by Fabien Dubuffet have also begun to explore three-dimensional numerical models with a similar focus.
References
[1] Vincent, A.P. and D.A. Yuen, Transition to turbulent thermal convection
beyond Ra=10^10 detected in numerical simulations, Phys. Rev. E., Vol. 61, No.
5, pp. 5241-5247, 2000.
[2] Skilbeck, J.N. and J.A. Whitehead, Formation of discrete islands in linear
chains, Nature, Vol. 272, pp 499-501, 1978.