The team of researcher Du Zhixue from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences recently published a breakthrough research in the magazine Science! Scientists confirmed for the first time through high-temperature and high-pressure experiments thatThere may be an astonishingly large primitive water reservoir deep in the Earth's lower mantle (below 660 kilometers). The water storage capacity is about 0.08 to 1 modern ocean water, which is equivalent to 8% to 100% of all ocean water on the surface..
The key to this research is that the scientific research team built an internationally leading technology platform and successfully simulated the extreme environment 660 kilometers deep underground (approximately 23-32GPa pressure, 1273-2100K high temperature) for the first time.
It is reported that,The Earth 4.6 billion years ago was not a blue planet. Frequent and violent astral collisions caused a sea of hot magma to boil on the surface and inside. Water could not exist in a liquid state, which was a desperate situation where life could not stand..
During the cooling process of the early Earth's magma ocean, solid minerals crystallized and gradually formed the mantle.
Among them, Bridgmanite is the earliest major mineral to crystallize in the earth's mantle and contains more than half of it. It is like a microscopic "water storage container", and its ability to "lock water" directly determines how much water can be transferred from the magma to the solid earth.
The latest research shows that the "water-locking" ability of minerals significantly increases as the temperature increases, which means that during the Earth's hottest "magma ocean" stage, the crystallizing Bridgmanite can actually "capture" and seal a vast amount of water far beyond what was previously imagined.
A magma ocean crystallization model based on experimental data shows that when the Earth's early magma ocean solidified,The lower mantle has become the largest water storage layer in the entire solid mantle, and its water storage capacity may be as high as 5 to 100 times as much as previously estimated by the scientific community..
