Equal-order finite element approximation for mantle-melt transport

Mantle convection and melt migration are important processes for understanding Earth’s dynamics and how they relate to observations at the surface. Recently it has been established that melt migration can be modelled by coupling variable-viscosity Stokes flow and Darcy flow, where Stokes flow generally captures the long-term behaviour of the mantle and lithosphere, and Darcy flow models the two-phase regime. It is known that approximating the solution by finite element methods requires the use of mixed inf-sup stable elements or additional stabilization terms. Here, we propose a formulation with a coercive non-symmetric linear operator which allows the use of simple equal-order elements.