Mantle avalanches in a Venus-like stagnant lid planet

Stagnant lid planets are characterized by a globe-encircling, conducting lid that is thick and strong, which leads to reduced global surface heat flows. Consequently, the mantles of such planets can have warmer interiors than Earth, and interestingly, a pyrolitic mantle composition under warmer conditions is predicted to have a distinctly different mantle transition zone compared to the present-day Earth (Hirose, 2002; Stixrude and Lithgow-Bertelloni, 2011; Ichikawa et al., 2014; Dannberg et al, 2022). Instead of olivine primarily transforming into its higher-pressure polymorphs such as wadsleyite and then ringwoodite, at pressures corresponding to 410 km and 520 km depth in Earth, respectively, it instead transforms into a mineral assemblage of wadsleyite, majorite, and ferropericlase (WMF), and then to majorite + ferropericlase (MF), before finally transforming into bridgmanite at pressures corresponding to 660 km depth in Earth (Stixrude and Lithgow-Bertelloni, 2011; Ichikawa et al., 2014). Convective motions in stagnant lid planets are dominated by small-scale instabilities (cold drips) forming within the mobile rheological sublayer under the rigid lid. Using ASPECT and a thermodynamic model of a pyrolitic mantle composition generated by HeFESTo, we show that under certain conditions, the small drips can pond atop the WMF-MF mineral phase transition. The barrier to convective flow arises from the WMF mineral phase assemblage having an effective negative thermal expansivity (Stixrude and Lithgow-Bertelloni, 2022). Although large-scale downwellings that typically occur within mobile lid planets are able to pass through the WMF zone without difficulty (Dannberg et al., 2022; Li RP et al., 2024), the smaller and less negatively buoyant nature of downwelling drips in stagnant lid planets are more susceptible to these effects, which leads to an ephemeral layering of the mantle. Our numerical models show that in stagnant lid planets with mantle potential temperatures that exceed 1900 K, the smaller, cold drips from the lid continue to pile up until enough of them have coalesced that they collectively avalanche as a larger instability into the deeper interior.