Li, Y; Vocadlo, L; Sun, T; Brodholt, J; (2020) The Earth’s core as a reservoir of water. Nature Geoscience , 13 pp. 453-458. 10.1038/s41561-020-0578-1.

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Abstract

Current estimates of the budget and distribution of water in the Earth have large uncertainties, most of which are due to the lack of information about the deep Earth. Recent studies suggest that the Earth could have gained a considerable amount of water during the early stages of its evolution from the hydrogen-rich solar nebula, and that a large amount of the water in the Earth may have partitioned into the core. Here we calculate the partitioning of water between iron and silicate melts at 20–135 GPa and 2,800–5,000 K, using ab initio molecular dynamics and thermodynamic integration techniques. Our results indicate a siderophile nature of water at core–mantle differentiation and core–mantle boundary conditions, which weakens with increasing temperature; nevertheless, we found that water always partitions strongly into the iron liquid under core-formation conditions for both reducing and oxidizing scenarios. The siderophile nature of water was also verified by an empirical-counting method that calculates the distribution of hydrogen in an equilibrated iron and silicate melt. We therefore conclude that the Earth’s core may act as a large reservoir that contains most of the Earth’s water. In addition to constraining the accretion models of volatile delivery, the findings may partially account for the low density of the Earth’s core implied by measured seismic velocities.

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