Physics of the Earth and planetary interiors
ECTS: 6
Unit administrator: Stéphane Labrosse
Class type: 60hrs of courses and practical classes
Language: english or french (depending on students enlisted)
Prerequisite (batchelor):
Seismology
Eric Debayle, Chloé Alder
- Introduction on earthquakes, seismic waves and seismometers
- Stress and strain
- Seismic waves
- Snell-Descartes laws
- Reflection and transmission coefficients for plane waves
- Seismic rays in a spherical Earth
- Surface waves and normal modes
Expected: proficiency in the basics of seismology.
- understanding of the link between seismic wave propagation and seismograms.
- being able to relate the laws of wave propagation to hodochrones
- knowing characteristics of body waves, guided waves and standing waves
Geodynamics
Stéphane Labrosse and Adrien Morison
Conductive heat transfer
- Primer on the conductive heat transfer equation
- Steady state solutions and simplistic models of the thermal structure of the Earth
- Infinite half-space cooling and application to the structure of the oceanic lithosphere
- Conduction in the continental lithosphere
- Global heat loss of the Earth
Thermal convection in planetary mantles
- Conservation equations in the Boussinesq approximation
- Dimensional analysis and the Rayleigh number. Linear stability analysis for Rayleigh-Bénard convection
- Finite amplitude convection. Overview of the different regimes. Scaling of heat transfer using different approaches
Thermal evolution of the Earth and planets
- Constraints on the thermal structure of the early Earth
- Parameterized evolution models using scaling laws for convective heat transfer in the mantle
- Notions on the thermodynamics of the core and coupled core-mantle evolution
Expected: Proficiency in the principles of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics and their application to the Earth interior.
Ressources :
- Lecture notes of geodynamics with exercises (in progress) [PDF] (login needed)
- Exercices (in french) [PDF]
- Exams from previous years (in french, login needed)
- White board files (login needed)
- Presonal webpage of Stéphane Labrosse
- Personal webpage of Éric Debayle
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