Kane Dane
The truth is, no humans have ever built beyond the crust, or dug deep enough to penetrate the rocky monastery of the earth, let alone its liquid iron core, so we have no idea what’s here. Type of conversation And it is not for lack of effort.
Sitting at a depth of about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles), the core of our planet is far beyond our technological reach, at least for now, and through still-to-learn guesswork and clever theoretical models, scientists pinpointed the background. draw a window in some environments. Our feet
Now, new research suggests that Earth’s molten core may leak iron into the upper mantle, which is a thousand degrees cooler than the liquid core.
For decades, scientists have debated whether cores and mantles exchange physical material.
Earth’s powerful magnetic field and its electrical currents certainly mean that there is a lot of iron in the core. Furthermore, samples of mantle rocks brought to the surface show a significant portion of the iron, leading some to speculate that the material comes from the core.
To get an idea of whether this might be possible
Researchers have shown in laboratory experiments how iron isotopes move between regions of different temperatures under high pressures and temperatures.
Using this information to build a model, the team’s results suggest that heavy iron isotopes can migrate from Earth’s warm core to the coldest mantle. Whereas light iron isotopes do the opposite and move from cold to hot back to the nucleus.
These results are still theoretical, but they can teach us something important about how the interior of our planet works.
“If true, it means improving our understanding of core-mantle interactions,” says geologist and petrologist Charles Lasher of Aarhus University in Denmark.
And that kind of knowledge is really important.
This can help us interpret seismic images in deep mantles and allow us to model how chemicals and heat rise and fall between Earth’s layers.
Using computer simulations, the authors were also able to show how this basic material could reach Earth’s surface, with heavy isotopes that essentially impede a ride on the stream of hot-mantled plums found in Samoa and Hawaii. A possible leaky core signature from Earth.
A study published last year suggested something similar.
Its authors found that the main material, in this case, the tungsten isotope, was also transferred to the surface through the rising plume of the mantle and that the core has been filtering this material for the past 2.5 billion years.
Lasher says his results also show that the iron isotopes in the nucleus have been stuffed for billions of years. But if the exchange is really happening this way, then the question is: what is the long-term effect?
At this time, no one really knows. The new simulation only suggests that leakage from the core to the mantle is possible under high temperatures and pressures, and may explain why the rocks in the mantle contain much more iron than meteorites: Essentially, the iron liquid comes from the heart. Has been
The authors believe that there is considerable uncertainty in some parameters of their model, such as diffusion, thermal conductivity, or the amount of central liquid that actually infiltrates the mantle. The chosen numbers may not represent the reality of the situation.
However, the exchange of iron isotopes through the core-mantle barrier by thermodiffusion appears to exceed the capacity of iron beyond our mantle, so to speak.
The source of the study is: Nature Geoscience
