Modelling of thermal stratification at the top of a planetary core: Application to the cores of Earth and Mercury and the thermal coupling with their mantles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new numerical scheme for modeling thermal stratification in planetary cores, revealing significant impacts on core evolution and mantle dynamics, especially for Mercury.

Contribution

A novel piece-wise steady flux numerical scheme for 1D conduction in spherical shells, enabling better modeling of stratified planetary cores.

Findings

Stratification causes the inner core to grow larger and increases heat flux at the core-mantle boundary.

Neglecting stratification can lead to underestimating Mercury's inner core age by billions of years.

Thermal stratification significantly affects Mercury's mantle temperature and convection duration.

Abstract

We present a new numerical scheme for one-dimensional conduction problems of a spherical shell. The scheme adopts a solution of the conduction equation in each interval of the chosen discretization that is valid if the fluxes at interval boundaries are constant in time. This piece-wise steady flux (PWSF) numerical scheme is continuous and differentiable in the space domain, which is convenient for implementing the numerical scheme in an energy-conserved thermal evolution model of a planetary core in which a conductive stratified layer develops below the core-mantle boundary when the heat flux is subadiabatic. The influence of a time-variable stratified region on the general evolution of the planetary body is examined, in comparison to imposing an adiabatic temperature profile for the core. By considering stratification in a planetary core where the heat flux is subadiabatic, radial variations in the cooling rate are accounted for whereas otherwise the distribution of energy in the core is fixed by the imposed adiabat. During the growth of the thermally stratified region, the deep part of the core cools more rapidly than the outer part of the core. Therefore, the inner core grows to a larger size and the temperature and heat flux at the core-mantle boundary are higher and larger, respectively, if a stratified region is considered. For the Earth, the implications are likely very minor and can be neglected in thermal evolution studies that are not specifically interested in the stratified region itself. For Mercury, these implications are much larger. For example, the age of the inner core can be underestimated by several billion years if thermal stratification is neglected. Consideration of thermal stratification in the core of Mercury also increases the mantle temperature, leads to a larger heat flux into the lithosphere, and prolongs mantle convection.