Supercontinental Cycles and the Tectonic Modulation of Earth's Climate

Plate tectonics involves the production of oceanic plates at spreading ridges, their destruction at subduction zones, where they sink into the underlying mantle as cold plumes, and a slow drift of buoyant continents at the surface. The resulting laterally and vertically extensive internal mantle motions cool the Earth efficiently and with remarkable consequences including long-lived hotspot volcanoes such as Hawaii, a persistent and strong magnetic field and a habitable climate. Over the last billion years, however, this regular mantle overturning and thorough thermal mixing has been punctuated by 2 transient periods during which the continents were drawn together to form the supercontinents Rodinia and Pangea. These supercontinents were encircled to differing extents by subduction zones where partial or complete "curtains" of cold downgoing oceanic slabs inhibited lateral mantle stirring, leading, in turn, to large temperature variations between the more rapidly cooled oceanic mantle and the more slowly cooled continental mantle. A key prediction from theory, numerical simulations and laboratory experiments is that, depending on the mantle thermal mixing efficiency, the relative cooling of the oceanic mantle during the formation of supercontinents will cause crustal production at spreading ridges to decline or cease entirely. We investigate two further provocative implications for Earth's climate during the Pangea and Rodinia supercontinental epochs. First, the total volcanic influx of CO2 to the ocean-atmosphere system may decline by 30-40%, probably causing a modest global cooling. Second, a near absence of basaltic crust at ridges exposes mantle rocks to seawater, which leads to extensive serpentinization and to a potentially large flux of abiogenic methane (CH4) into the deep ocean. Whereas we expect all of this CH4 to be oxidized in the oxygen-rich and biologically complex Pangean ocean, some fraction of this CH4 flux may contribute to the composition of low-oxygen Rodinian atmosphere and influence climate in remarkable ways. A particular situation we explore is whether the transient mantle dynamics of the formation and breakup of Rodinia ultimately caused Earth to enter into, and exit from, periods of global glaciation consistent with the snowball Earth hypothesis.