Thermal and Magnetic Evolution of Earth’s Interior

Overview

This example shows how Earth’s interior evolves in a plate tectonics-like mode.

Date

10/03/18

Author

Peter Driscoll

Modules

RadHeat ThermInt

Approx. runtime

<1 second

This example shows the thermal and magnetic evolution of Earth’s interior from ThermInt and RadHeat. The model is 1-D and many free parameters have been tuned to reproduce Earth’s current properties. Earth is divided in a core, mantle, and crust. The evolution depends only on the temperature of the core and mantle. These figures are similar to Fig. 5 in Driscoll & Bercovici (2014).

To run this example

vplanet vpl.in
python makeplot.py <pdf | png>

Expected output

examples/EarthInterior1.png
examples/EarthInterior2.png

Nominal thermal history of the Earth, mantle and core. Radiogenic heating is from RadHeat. Magnetic moment evolution is estimated from the core energy balance and inner core growth.