A Recipe for Exotic Continental Fragment Formation: Key Constraints From Numerical Rift Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Wilson Cycle describes the opening and closing of oceans, generating new plate boundaries at continental rifts, and extinguishing ancient plate boundaries with continental collisions (creating a continental suture). However, the general view of the Wilson Cycle does not fully explain more complex tectonic scenarios. For example, rifting can create exotic continental fragments, where a piece of continent becomes displaced from its principal part and stranded on another tectonic plate. Despite the prevalence of stranded fragments in the geological record, their formation processes remain poorly understood. Here, we conducted 2‐D numerical rift models to systematically test the tectonic influence of a variety of inherited geological structures that could be generated from the closing of an old plate boundary. Through automated detection of continental breakup and measurement of continental fragment dimensions, the models show that fragment width is directly controlled by the geometry of the inherited structures, including the dip angle and extent of the old subduction suture, as well as the extent of orogenic deformation. However, the initial geotherm, strain and rheological weaknesses in both the crust and mantle lithosphere, along with the divergence rate, can influence strain localization during rifting. Notably, a very ductile lithosphere leads to prolonged delocalized thinning and wider rifts. Overall, the models produce continental fragments in widths ∼175–350 km, aligning with many geological examples. Moreover, our work provides key physical constraints that can be applied in future regional applications and highlights the role of different forms of structural inheritance during rifting and continental fragment formation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".