Scienceblogtwo

The composition of the Earth's continents abruptly changed as a result of the evolution of land plants, according to research from the University of Southampton. Dr. Tom Gernon's Southampton team, along with associates from Queen's University of Canada, the University of Cambridge, the University of Aberdeen, and the China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, investigated how the evolution of land plants affected the Earth's chemical composition over the course of the previous 700 million years. Recent publications of the researchers' findings in Nature Geoscience. According to some study, ferns developed around 430 million years ago and were among the earliest terrestrial plants to conquer the continents. At this same time, the scientists record a significant change in the makeup of the continental crust, which they attribute to significant adjustments in river systems brought on by the evolution of land plants. Tom Gernon of the University of Southampton is to be cre...

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...