Water leakage into Earth's core could have spawned mysterious layer that ejects crystals - study

Water from the Earth can penetrate deep into the planet, and a new study explains how it changes the outer region of a metallic liquid core. This discovery could explain the presence of a thin layer of material inside the planet that has that has stumped geologists for decades. This is stated in a new study published on November 13 in the journal Nature Geoscience, reports UNN.

Details

Scientists may have finally found the cause of the mysterious crystal-forming layer that surrounds the Earth's core - a "water leak" that flows down from the the Earth's surface and reacts with the metal heart of our planet.

In the 1990s, geologists discovered a thin layer surrounding the Earth's outer core - a swirling ocean of liquid metal that surrounds a solid inner core. The layer, called the E-prime or E' layer, is more than 100 kilometers thick - relatively thin compared to other parts of the Earth's interior - and is located approximately 2900 km below the Earth's surface.

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Earlier, scientists put forward the theory that the E' layer was left by ancient iron-rich magma. Other theories argue that it came from the the inner core or was formed during the collision of the Earth with a protoplanet that gave birth to the Moon and left chunks of the baby world inside the Earth. But neither of these ideas has found wide acceptance.

In the new study, scientists found that the E' layer was probably created was created by water seeping from the Earth's surface through subduction or subduction of tectonic plates and then reacts with the metallic surface of the outer core.

If the new discovery is correct, it means that layer E' formed a large number of silica crystals as a byproduct of this reaction, which were fed into the mantle, the massive layer of magma that lies between the outer core and the Earth's outer crust.

In the study, the researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments to reproduce how water can react with the outer core under under intense pressure. This showed that hydrogen from water replaces silica in the liquid metal, which displaces silica from the metal in the form of crystals. Thus, the layer E' layer is probably a hydrogen-saturated and silica-depleted layer of the outer layer of the outer core, which contradicts previous assumptions about its composition.

The researchers believe that it probably took more than 1 billion years for the E' layer to reach its current thickness, meaning it may be older than the inner core, which solidified about 1 billion years ago.

The new discovery is another sign that our current understanding of how the understanding of how the outer core and mantle interact with each other may be incomplete.

Update

In September 2022, the same research team found that the outflowing water can react with large reservoirs of carbon in the outer core to create a giant to create giant diamond factories near the core-mantle boundary.

For many years, it was thought that the exchange of material between the Earth's core and mantle is small

But these discoveries "point to a much more dynamic interaction between the core and the mantle, suggesting a substantial exchange of materials."