Instability of the Earth's Lithosphere

At small deformations, as laboratory experiments with rock samples show, transient creep occurs. According to plate tectonics, deformations in the lithospheric plates are very small. Thus, the rheology of the lithosphere is fundamentally different from the rheology of the underlying mantle. The author studies dynamic processes in the lithospheric plates and develops an adequate mathematical apparatus based on the Laplace transform in time and the Fourier transform in horizontal spatial coordinates. The book, presented in the form of a collection of the author's articles, is addressed to researchers in the field of geophysics and to senior students having acquired sufficient knowledge in the field of mathematics. This book can be recommended reading for a course of geodynamics in any university.

B.I. Birger was born on January 19, 1944, in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia, with a degree in theoretical physics. Since 1974 he has been working at the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is engaged in theoretical research of thermal convection and other geodynamic processes in the Earth's mantle associated with the complex non-Newtonian rheology of the mantle. B.I. Birger developed a new nonlinear and memory- based rheological model of the mantle material and for the first time introduced into geophysics the concept of thermoconvective oscillations and waves. B.I. Birger considers low-amplitude thermoconvective oscillations of the continental lithosphere as a mechanism that causes the oscillatory movements of the earth's crust known in geology and determines the formation and evolution of sedimentary basins. In recent years, B.I. Birger has been working on problems of seismology.