Is the Earth’s core leaking? Scientists found its content in volcanic magma

Scientists from the The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has found signs that material is flowing out of the solid of the Earth’s inner core to the surface. 

It was believed that solid, mostly iron-nickel, the Earth’s inner core prevents the leakage of matter to the outside. However, American scientists have analyzed rocks from volcanic islands in Hawaii and found evidence that leaks from the inner core occur and the material is pushed to the surface by hot magma flows. 

Previous studies analyzing the relative abundance of certain isotopes have shown that some volcanic rocks contain elements from the Earth’s inner core. In particular, some rock samples from The Baffin Earths in Canada have an unusually high content of helium-3 (³He). In addition, the scientists recorded an abnormal ratio of tungsten and hydrogen isotopes. 

This may indicate material that originated from exchanges that occur at a depth of 2,900 km below the Earth’s surface, at the boundary between the inner core and the rocky mantle. However, according to the scientists, the signs were not unambiguous, as helium and hydrogen are not specific elements in the core and can also be part of the mantle.

In search of more convincing evidence, the scientists focused on the detection of ruthenium isotopes. They measured the relative abundance of ruthenium atoms with atomic weights of 100, 101, and 102 in rock samples from Hawaii. The team found that the signatures of ruthenium isotopes were significantly different from those observed elsewhere in the Earth’s crust.

According to scientists, inner core the Earth was formed about 1 billion years ago. However, the mantle and crust contain a lot of material from later meteorite bombardments of the planet. This means that different regions have different isotope concentrations that can characterize the differences between the core, mantle, and crust. 

In addition, the scientists emphasize that their results prove that the magma flow that carries material from the inner core to the surface must begin at the core-mantle boundary.

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The results of the study are published in the journal Nature

Source: Nature