Submitted by _whydah_ t3_10phvgl in askscience
agate_ t1_j6nidr1 wrote
Reply to comment by CrustalTrudger in How viscous is the magma in the mantle? by _whydah_
One way to think about the fact that “the mantle is a solid but it flows” is to think about ice. Ice is a solid, just look at an ice cube, and yet a kilometer-thick glacier flows.
Like ice, the mantle isn’t perfectly solid. But if you compare it’s viscosity to that of a glacier, you find that the mantle is roughly a million times more solid than ice.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00385-x/figures/2
(Ice is also a non-Newtonian fluid, so a precise comparison isn’t possible.)
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