Carbon is essential for life as we know it and plays a vital role in many of our planet’s geologic processes—not to mention the impact that carbon released by human activity has on the planet’s atmosphere and oceans.
Carbon is essential for life as we know it and plays a vital role in many of our planet’s geologic processes—not to mention the impact that carbon released by human activity has on the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. Despite this, the total amount of carbon on Earth remains a mystery, because much of it remains inaccessible in the planet’s depths.
New work published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how carbon behaved during Earth’s violent formative period. The findings can help scientists understand how much carbon likely exists in the planet’s core and the contributions it could make to the chemical and dynamic activity occurring there—including to the convective motion powering the magnetic field that protects Earth from cosmic radiation.
Earth’s core is comprised mostly of iron and nickel, but its density indicates the presence of other lighter elements, such as carbon, silicon, oxygen, sulfur, or hydrogen. It’s been long suspected that there’s a tremendous reservoir of carbon hiding down there. But to attempt to quantify it, the research team used laboratory mimicry to understand how it got into the core in the first place.
The group was comprised of Harvard University’s Rebecca Fischer, the Smithsonian Institution’s Elizabeth Cottrell and Marion Le Voyer, both former Carnegie postdoctoral fellows, Yale University’s Kanani Lee, and Carnegie’s late Erik Hauri, the memory of whom the authors acknowledge.
Read more at Carnegie Institution for Science
Photo Credit: WikiImages via Pixabay
