Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have helped untangle a long-standing mystery of astrophysics: why iron is found spattered throughout Earth’s mantle, the roughly 2,000-mile thick region between Earth’s core and its crust.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have helped untangle a long-standing mystery of astrophysics: why iron is found spattered throughout Earth’s mantle, the roughly 2,000-mile thick region between Earth’s core and its crust.
At first blush, it seemed more reasonable that iron arriving from collisions between Earth and planetesimals — ranging from several meters to hundreds of kilometers in diameter — during Earth’s late formative stages should have powered bullet-like directly to Earth’s core, where so much iron already exists.
A second, correlative mystery is why the moon proportionately has much less iron in its mantle than does Earth. Since the moon would have undergone the same extraterrestrial bombardment as its larger neighbor, what could explain the relative absence of that element in the moon’s own mantle?
To answer these questions, scientists led by Professor Stein Jacobsen at Harvard University and Professor Sarah Stewart at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) wondered whether the accepted theoretical value of the vaporization point of iron under high pressures was correct. If vaporization occurred at lower pressures than assumed, a solid piece of iron after impact might disperse into an iron vapor that would blanket the forming Earth instead of punching through it. A resultant iron-rich rain would create the pockets of the element currently found in the mantle.
As for the moon, the same dissolution of iron into vapor could occur, but the satellite’s weaker gravity would be unable to capture the bulk of the free-floating iron atoms, explaining the dearth of iron deposits on Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Looking for experimental rather than theoretical values, researchers turned to Sandia’s Z machine and its Fundamental Science Program, coordinated by Sandia manager Thomas Mattsson. This led to a collaboration among Sandia, Harvard University, UC Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to determine an experimental value for the vaporization threshold of iron that would replace the theoretical value used for decades.
Continue reading at Sandia National Laboratories.
Earth image via Shutterstock.
