BibTeX
@ARTICLE{
         Iaffaldano2007Mbg,
       author = "G. Iaffaldano and H.-P. Bunge and H. M. B{\"u}cker",
       title = "Mountain belt growth inferred from histories of past plate convergence: {A} new
         tectonic inverse problem",
       journal = "Earth and Planetary Science Letters",
       volume = "260",
       number = "3--4",
       pages = "516--523",
       doi = "10.1016/j.epsl.2007.06.006",
       abstract = "Past plate motions display a range of variability, including speedups and slowdowns
         that cannot easily be attributed to changes in mantle related driving forces. One key controlling
         factor for these variations is the surface topography at convergent margins, as previous modeling
         shows that the topographic load of large mountain belts consumes a significant amount of the driving
         forces available for plate tectonics by increasing frictional forces between downgoing and
         overriding plates. Here we use this insight to pose a new tectonic inverse problem and to infer the
         growth of mountain belts from a record of past plate convergence. We introduce the automatic
         differentiation method, which is a technique to produce derivative code free of truncation error by
         source transformation of the forward model. We apply the method to a publicly available global
         tectonic thin-shell model and generate a simple derivative code to relate Nazca/South America plate
         convergence to gross topography of the Andes mountain belt. We test the code in a search algorithm
         to infer an optimal paleotopography of the Andes 3.2 m.y. ago from the well-known history of
         Nazca/South America plate convergence. Our modeling results are in excellent agreement with
         published estimates of Andean paleotopography and support the notion of strong feedback between
         mountain belt growth and plate convergence.",
       year = "2007",
       ad_area = "Geophysics",
       ad_tools = "ADIFOR"
}