A role for subducting clays in the water transportation into the Earth’s lower mantle

Yoonah Bang, Huijeong Hwang, Hanns-Peter Liermann, Duck Young Kim, Yu He, Tae-Yeol Jeon, Tae Joo Shin, Dongzhou Zhang, Dmitry Popov and Yongjae Lee ()
Additional contact information
Yoonah Bang: Yonsei University
Huijeong Hwang: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Hanns-Peter Liermann: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Duck Young Kim: Center for High Pressure Science & Technology Advanced Research
Yu He: Center for High Pressure Science & Technology Advanced Research
Tae-Yeol Jeon: POSTECH
Tae Joo Shin: Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)
Dongzhou Zhang: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Dmitry Popov: X-ray Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Yongjae Lee: Yonsei University

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Subducting sedimentary layer typically contains water and hydrated clay minerals. The stability of clay minerals under such hydrous subduction environment would therefore constraint the lithology and physical properties of the subducting slab interface. Here we show that pyrophyllite (Al2Si4O10(OH)2), one of the representative clay minerals in the alumina-silica-water (Al2O3-SiO2-H2O, ASH) system, breakdowns to contain further hydrated minerals, gibbsite (Al(OH)3) and diaspore (AlO(OH)), when subducts along a water-saturated cold subduction geotherm. Such a hydration breakdown occurs at a depth of ~135 km to uptake water by ~1.8 wt%. Subsequently, dehydration breakdown occurs at ~185 km depth to release back the same amount of water, after which the net crystalline water content is preserved down to ~660 km depth, delivering a net amount of ~5.0 wt% H2O in a phase assemblage containing δ-AlOOH and phase Egg (AlSiO3(OH)). Our results thus demonstrate the importance of subducting clays to account the delivery of ~22% of water down to the lower mantle.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48501-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-48501-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48501-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().