Cooling of the continental plate during flat-slab subduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Most flat-slab subduction regions are marked by an absence of arc volcanism, which is consistent with closure of the hot mantle wedge as the subducting plate flattens below the continent. Farther inland, low surface heat flow is observed, which is generally attributed to cooling of the continent by the underlying flat slab. However, modern flat slabs have only been in place for <20 Ma, and it is unclear whether there has been sufficient time for cooling to occur. We use numerical models to assess temporal variations in continental thermal structure during flat-slab subduction. Our models show that the flat slab leads to continental cooling on timescales of tens of millions of years. Cool slab temperatures must diffuse through the continental lithosphere, resulting in a delay between slab emplacement and surface cooling. Therefore, the timescales primarily depend on the flat-slab depth with shallower slabs resulting in shorter timescales. The magnitude of cooling increases for a shallow or long-lived flat slab, old subducting plate, and fast convergence rates. For regions with flat slabs at 45–70 km depth (e.g., Mexico and Peru), shallow continental cooling initiates 5–10 Ma after slab emplacement, and low surface heat flow in these regions is largely explained by the presence of the flat slab. However, for the Pampean region in Chile, with an ~100-km-deep slab, our models predict that conductive cooling has not yet affected the surface heat flow. The low heat flow observed requires additional processes such as advective cooling from the infiltration of fluids released through dehydration of the flat slab.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".