On Convection in a Viscoelastic Plastic Model of the Earth's Crust and Mantle

摘要

The reconciliation of Rayleigh-Benard convection currents with the transmission of shear waves in the mantle imposes rather strong and thus useful restrictions on the rheological models which can accommodate both of them and thereby serves to guide in the selection of an appropriate visco-elastic material for modeling the mantle with respect to its mechanical behavior. Some definite results are established which bear on the selection of an appropriate yet simple rheological model of the mantle by posing the question of hydrodynamic stability with respect to two essentially different rheological models. These are the Maxwell and Sesawa-Voigt materials.