Continental eclogites and the Wilson Cycle

The Wilson Cycle, the repeated opening and closing of oceans, commonly along roughly the same lines, is here attributed to the presence of eclogite-facies roots of partially collapsed orogens. We present a finite-element thermal model that suggests that such roots will weaken the orogenic lithosphere relative to that of the adjacent foreland for hundreds of millions of years and make it a preferred sire for later rifting.