Scienceblogtwo

Steel rusts on the surface of the Earth as a result of water and air. But what about the Earth's innards deep within? The Earth's core, where 90% of the carbon is stored, is the planet's largest carbon reservoir. Scientists have demonstrated that hydrous minerals can occasionally reach the boundary between the core and the mantle in the oceanic crust, which sits on top of tectonic plates and sinks into the interior. In order for water to escape from the hydrous minerals, the temperature at the core-mantle boundary must be at least two times higher than that of lava. As a result, a chemical reaction resembling rusting steel may take place close to the core-mantle barrier of the Earth. In the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Byeongkwan Ko, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Arizona State University, and his colleagues recently published their research on the core-mantle boundary. At the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory, they conducted experiments in wh...