Correlation between terrestrial heat flow and thermal conductivity

The significant correlation coefficient between the terrestial heat flow and thermal conductivity computed from the continental heat flow data by Horai and Nur [1]2) may be explained as a natural consequence of terrestrial heat flow through a random medium. The theory predicts a value of 0.40 for the correlation coefficient. A simple statistical test shows that the majority of the computed coefficients belong to the statistical population whose mean is equal to the theoretical correlation coefficient. There are, however, a few observations of unsually high correlation coefficient which cannot be explained by the above hypothesis.