Abstract:

With the aim of describing the mountain building process, we have previously applied the lubrication approximation to obtain the evolution equations of the problem of two stacked layers of viscous fluids with different densities and different viscosities. The lubrication approximation is a perturbation method where the small parameter is the aspect ratio (thickness/lenght) of the current. This approximation is widely used to study the slow flow of one layer of a viscous fluid, but it is not well known under which conditions it can be applied in more general settings. Here we analyze in detail the assumptions needed to apply the lubrication theory to study the flow of two stacked viscous fluid layers. We employ the same perturbation method and we found that, besides the usual conditions (low Reynolds number and gentle slope), we must require that the viscosity and density ratios are of the order of unity. These requirements determine the range of validity of the equations of our model of the mountain building.