Recent research by scientists, including those from Arizona State University, has made a groundbreaking discovery about Earth’s inner workings.
They’ve found that water from the surface can travel deep into the planet, transforming the outer layer of its core.
For a long time, what happens deep inside Earth was largely a mystery. But now, thanks to this new study published in Nature Geoscience, we’re getting a clearer picture.
The researchers have uncovered that water from Earth’s surface can go as deep as the boundary between the core and the mantle. That’s about 1,800 miles below the surface!
A few decades ago, seismologists (scientists who study earthquakes and the structure of the earth) noticed a thin layer deep inside Earth, just over a few hundred kilometers thick.
They called it the E prime layer, but its origin was unknown. This latest research has finally solved that mystery. It turns out this layer is formed by water interacting with the outermost part of Earth’s metallic liquid core.
How does this happen? When water reaches deep down to where the core and the mantle meet, it starts a chemical reaction.
The team of scientists, including Dan Shim, Taehyun Kim, and Joseph O’Rourke of Arizona State University, along with Yong Jae Lee of Yonsei University in South Korea, conducted experiments to understand this process. They found that water reacts with silicon in the core.
This reaction creates a hydrogen-rich layer and forms silica crystals.
To study this, the researchers used advanced equipment at the Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Lab and PETRA III of Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany.
These facilities helped them replicate the extreme conditions at the core-mantle boundary, allowing them to observe these reactions firsthand.
This discovery changes our understanding of Earth’s interior. The layer formed by this water-core interaction is less dense and has different seismic properties.
This aligns with what seismologists have observed in the past. Shim notes that this finding, along with their earlier work on diamonds forming from water reacting with iron, suggests a dynamic exchange of materials between Earth’s core and mantle.
In simple terms, it shows that Earth’s water cycle is much more extensive than we thought, connecting surface water with the deep metallic core.
This new understanding is crucial for grasping the complex geochemical cycles of our planet.
