Silicon in the Earth’s core

R. Bastian Georg, Alex N. Halliday (), Edwin A. Schauble and Ben C. Reynolds
Additional contact information
R. Bastian Georg: University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PR, UK
Alex N. Halliday: University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PR, UK
Edwin A. Schauble: University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567, USA
Ben C. Reynolds: ETH Zentrum NW, Clausiusstrasse 25, CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerland

Nature, 2007, vol. 447, issue 7148, 1102-1106

Abstract: Silicon to the core The Earth and Moon have iron isotopic abundances that are slightly 'heavy' compared with Mars, the asteroid Vesta and primitive meteorites. The reason for this has been unclear. One suggestion is that there was a large-scale isotopic equilibration during the 'giant impact', the collision between the early Earth and a Mars-sized body that created the Moon, but this has seemed unlikely given that most other elements do not show the effect. An analysis of 44 meteorite and terrestrial samples now shows that the silicon isotopic compositions of basaltic rocks from the Earth and Moon are also distinctly heavy. The finding is consistent with the isotopic equilibration model, and it suggests that silicon was already partitioned into the Earth's core as a light element before the Moon formed.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05927 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:447:y:2007:i:7148:d:10.1038_nature05927

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature05927

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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