Study: With locked crust, Earth could become another Venus HOUSTON, May 12, 2008 — A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet’s crust to become locked in place.
Conventional wisdom holds that plate tectonics is both stable and self-correcting, but that view relies on the assumption that excess heat from the Earth's mantle can efficiently escape through the crust. The stress generated by flowing…
