A New Version of the Heat Flow Map of the Urals with Paleoclimatic Corrections

摘要

Previous investigations in the Urals revealed a regional anomaly of low heat flow. One of the strongest sources of distortion of the Earth's natural thermal field is related to variations in the Earth's surface temperature in the past. The distortions caused by the influence of the paleoclimate play a specific role in the formation of the Uralian anomalously low heat flow (ALHF) zone, which is distinguished in the map based on its measured values. No correction for the climate of the past epochs was introduced in the Urals during determination of the heat flow due to a lack of exact data about the duration of climatic epochs and amplitude of temperature variation during this time (see, for example, [5]). The first attempt to introduce paleoclimatic corrections to the measured heat flow in the Urals was made by Kuk-konen in [9]. The approach was simplified because only the maximal depth of the heat flow determination was taken into account, while the distortions caused by the influence of the paleoclimate are nonuniformly distributed by depth [4]. Up to the present time, there is no unified method to account for these distortions. Some of the researchers either reject the strong influence of the paleoclimate on the measured heat flow or, on the contrary, overestimate it, completely attributing the appearance of the anomaly to this effect.