The Breakup of Earth: from rock fracture modeling to a new hypothesis of Earth evolution

The magma ocean that existed on the early Earth finally solidified to form a coherent lithosphere. This lithosphere insulated the underlying mantle leading to warming, thermal expansion, partial melting and a geoid bulge. This in turn may trigger breakup of the lithosphere and the onset of plate tectonics. As a consequence, heat balance is disturbed, which results in thermal fluctuation. On a global scale, a cycle of warming and cooling happened many times throughout geological history. This in turn may induce geological events as a response to the thermal cycles. The speaker will present a simple model of Earth evolution as a thermal system, based on rock fracture modeling method, trying to answer many questions about Earth’s history that are as yet unanswered.

Dr. C.A. Tang, as a chair Professor (funded by Cheung Kong Scholar Programme from State Education Ministry), is the Director of the Center for Rock Instability and Seismicity Research (CRISR) of Dalian University of Technology, China, and the Chair Professor of Computational Geoscience Research Center, Chengdu University of Technology, China. He is also the Vice President of the Chinese Society of Rock Mechanics CSRM, and the China National Group Chairman of International Society of Rock Mechanics. He got his Ph.D in 1988, in Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, and continued his post-doctoral work between 1991-1992, in Imperial College, London, UK. Then, as an academic visitor, he had lots of experience in Canada, Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong. He leads several major research projects in rock mechanics, especially on rock failure process analysis and monitoring in civil engineering. So far, he has published more than 300 technical papers on rock failure mechanisms and civil engineering, and is the author of six books of rock mechanics and the principle author of “Rock Failure Mechanisms” published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group. In recent years, he is keen on Earth science research and, based on mechanics thinking, he put forward a new theory of Earth Evolution.