A review of observations and models of dynamic topography - residual topography and dynamic topography grids

Full description

This data collection is associated with the publication: Flament, N., Gurnis, M., & Müller, R. D. (2013). A review of observations and models of dynamic topography. Lithosphere, 5(2), 189-210. doi: 10.1130/l245.1

Publication Abstract

The topography of Earth is primarily controlled by lateral differences in the density structure of the crust and lithosphere. In addition to this isostatic topography, flow in the mantle induces deformation of its surface leading to dynamic topography. This transient deformation evolves over tens of millions of years, occurs at long wavelength, and is relatively small (5000 km), we show that there is good agreement between published residual topography fields, including the one described here, and present-day dynamic topography predicted from mantle flow models, including a new one. Residual and predicted fields show peak-to-peak amplitudes of roughly ±2 km and a dominant degree two pattern with high values for the Pacific Ocean, southern Africa, and the North Atlantic and low values for South America, western North America, and Eurasia. The flooding of continental interiors has long been known to require both larger amplitudes and to be temporally phase-shifted compared with inferred eustatic changes. Such long-wavelength inferred vertical motions have been attributed to dynamic topography. An important consequence of dynamic topography is that long-term global sea-level change cannot be estimated at a single passive margin. As a case study, we compare the results of three published models and of our model to the subsidence history of well COST-B2 offshore New Jersey. The

Authors and Institutions

Nicholas Flament - EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. ORCID: 0000-0002-3237-0757

Michael Gurnis - Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA

R. Dietmar Müller - EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. ORCID: 0000-0002-3334-5764

Overview of Resources Contained

This collection comprises gridded data of four independently calculated present-day residual topography fields, and five independently calculated present-day dynamic topography models, used in the dynamic topography review of Flament et al. (2013).

List of Resources

Note: For details on the files included in this data collection, see “Description_of_Resources.txt”.

Note: For information on file formats and what programs to use to interact with various file formats, see “File_Formats_and_Recommended_Programs.txt”.

• Residual topography models - flament-et-al-2013, kaban-et-al-2003, panasyuk-hager-2000, steinberger-2007 (.nc, .txt, .kmz, .tif, .jpg, total 322.8 MB)
• Dynamic topography models - Conrad2009, Flament2013, Ricard1993, Spasojevic2012, Steinberger2007 (.nc, .txt, .kmz, .tif, .jpg, total 403.1 MB)

For more information on this data collection, and links to other datasets from the EarthByte Research Group please visit EarthByte

For more information about using GPlates, including tutorials and a user manual please visit GPlates or EarthByte