Journal ArticleDOI
Accretion of the Earth and segregation of its core
TLDR
The current composition of the mantle indicates that much of the re-equilibration took place in a deep (> 400 km) molten silicate layer, or ‘magma ocean’, and that conditions became more oxidizing with time as the Earth grew.Abstract:
The Earth took 30-40 million years to accrete from smaller 'planetesimals'. Many of these planetesimals had metallic iron cores and during growth of the Earth this metal re-equilibrated with the Earth's silicate mantle, extracting siderophile ('iron-loving') elements into the Earth's iron-rich core. The current composition of the mantle indicates that much of the re-equilibration took place in a deep (> 400 km) molten silicate layer, or 'magma ocean', and that conditions became more oxidizing with time as the Earth grew. The high-pressure nature of the core-forming process led to the Earth's core being richer in low-atomic-number elements, notably silicon and possibly oxygen, than the cores of the smaller planetesimal building blocks.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Redox State of Earth's Mantle
TL;DR: In this article, the upper mantle oxygen fugacity at the top of the spinel peridotite rocks is shown to fall within 2 log units of the fayalite-magnetite-quartz (FMQ) oxygen buffer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Serpentinization as a source of energy at the origin of life.
TL;DR: Hydrothermal mounds accumulating at similar sites in today's oceans offer conceptual and experimental models for the chemistry germane to the emergence of life, although the ubiquity of microbial communities at such sites in addition to the authors' oxygenated atmosphere preclude an exact analogy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Accretion and differentiation of the terrestrial planets with implications for the compositions of early-formed Solar System bodies and accretion of water
David C. Rubie,Seth A. Jacobson,Seth A. Jacobson,Alessandro Morbidelli,David P. O'Brien,Edward D. Young,J. de Vries,Francis Nimmo,Herbert Palme,Daniel J. Frost +9 more
TL;DR: In this article, a multistage core-mantle differentiation model with N-body accretion simulations is proposed to test accretion simulation as well as planetary differentiation scenarios, and the model is refined by least squares minimization with up to five fitting parameters that consist of the metal-silicate equilibration pressure and 1-4 parameters that define the starting compositions of primitive bodies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ingassing, Storage, and Outgassing of Terrestrial Carbon through Geologic Time
TL;DR: Dasgupta et al. as discussed by the authors studied the evolution of the mantle carbon inventory over geologic time and found that the average residence time of carbon in the mantle is between 1 and 4 Ga, which is a reflection of carbon ingassing and outgassing rates throughout Earth's history.
Book
Deformation of Earth Materials: An Introduction to the Rheology of Solid Earth
TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive, unified treatment of the materials science of deformation as applied to solid Earth geophysics and geology is presented in a systematic way covering elastic, anelastic and viscous deformation.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The composition of the Earth
William F. McDonough,Shen-Su Sun +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the relative abundances of the refractory elements in carbonaceous, ordinary, and enstatite chondritic meteorites and found that the most consistent composition of the Earth's core is derived from the seismic profile and its interpretation, compared with primitive meteorites, and chemical and petrological models of peridotite-basalt melting relationships.
Journal ArticleDOI
Composition of the Earth
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reported that the resulting densities in the lower mantle are in good agreement with shock-wave measurements on rocks having FeO contents in the range 10 ± 2% by weight.
Journal ArticleDOI
Elasticity and constitution of the Earth's interior
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors derived a general equation for the variation of the quantity,, in a homogeneous gravitating layer with an arbitrary gradient of temperature, and discussed the parameters of this equation in terms of the experimental and theoretical relations for solids.
Journal ArticleDOI
Aerodynamics of solid bodies in the solar nebula.
BookDOI
Origin of the Earth and Moon
TL;DR: In this paper, a theory of the origin of the Earth is presented, based on the Mantle-Crust system and the formation of the inner core of the Moon, which is a major component of the outer core.