PRECIOUS METAL Geochemists explore platinum, gold and other rare elements that are attracted to iron to understand how Earth's core formed billions of years ago.
Four and a half billion years ago, after Earth’s fiery birth, the infant planet began to radically reshape itself, separating into distinct layers. Metals — mostly iron with a bit of nickel — fell toward the center to form a core. The growing core also vacuumed up other metallic elements, such as platinum, iridium and gold.
By the time the core finished forming, about 30 million years later, it had sequestered more than 98 percent of these precious elements. The outer layers of the planet — the mantle and the crust — had barely any platinum and gold left. That’s why these metals are so rare today.
Battles have been fought, and wars won, over the pull of shiny precious metals, which have long symbolized power and influence. But for scientists, the rare metals’ lure is less about their shimmering beauty than about the powerful stories they can tell about how the Earth, the moon and other planetary bodies formed and evolved.
By analyzing rare primordial materials, researchers are uncovering geochemical fingerprints that have survived essentially unchanged over billions of years. These fingerprints allow scientists to compare Earth rocks with moon rocks and test ideas about whether giant meteorites once dusted the inner solar system with extraterrestrial platinum and gold. Such research can help scientists learn how volatiles such as water may have spread, leaving some worlds water-rich and others bone-dry.
These explorations, motivated by a growing appreciation of what such rare metals reveal about Earth’s history, are now possible thanks to new analytical techniques. “They give us a window into all kinds of processes that we want to understand,” says Richard Walker, a geochemist at the University of Maryland in College Park.
The highly siderophile elements
Eight elements that are very much attracted to iron.
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Geochemical memory
Platinum and gold are among eight occupants of the periodic table belonging to the category known as the highly siderophile elements. That name dates back to the 1920s, when Victor Goldschmidt, a mineralogist at the University of Oslo, divided the elements into groups depending on what they liked to combine with in nature. His four classifications are still used today: the lithophiles (rock-lovers), the chalcophiles (ore- or sulfur-lovers), the atmophiles (gas-lovers) and siderophiles, the iron-lovers.
The siderophile elements tend not to ally themselves with the oxygen- and silicon-based compounds that form the bulk of Earth’s crust. They form dense alloys with iron instead. One such element, tungsten (symbolized by W in the periodic table), is an iron-lover that has been important in recent scientific studies of Earth’s geologic history. A step beyond tungsten are those highly siderophile elements, which are even bigger fans of iron. They are ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, rhenium, osmium and iridium along with platinum and gold.
Because highly siderophile elements are relatively abundant in the core and scarce in the mantle and crust, they help scientists trace how Earth’s insides have evolved over time. Dig up a rock from deep within a mine, or pick up one from a freshly erupted volcano, and you can measure the siderophile elements within. The measurements might show whether a radioactive version of one such element has decayed into another, or whether the rock has higher amounts of one particular variety of siderophile. In turn, that information can reveal how material has shifted around and been chemically processed deep within the planet.
Fans of Fe
Eight chemical elements, known as the highly siderophile elements, are preferentially drawn to iron when molten. Most of them have relatively high melting points and resist being corroded or oxidized. Along with the siderophile tungsten, they serve as powerful tracers for how Earth’s interior separated into layers billions of years ago.
E. OTWELL
By analyzing the iron-lovers within each rock, scientists can probe what the rock has been doing for billions of years. “We can trace the entire evolutionary process of how a planet formed,” says James Day, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “That’s why someone like me is interested.”
For instance, Walker and his colleagues have explored siderophile elements in some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Through the process of plate tectonics, in which plates of Earth’s crust grind against, pull apart from and occasionally dive beneath one another, most ancient rocks have been dragged back into the planet and destroyed by melting. But in southwestern Greenland, in a place called Isua, a chunk of ancient crust never got pulled down by plate tectonics (SN: 3/24/07, p. 179). Walker and colleagues, led by Hanika Rizo of the University of Quebec in Montreal, recently studied siderophile elements in these 3.3-billion- to 3.8-billion-year-old rocks.
The scientists looked at the abundance of highly siderophile elements in the Greenland rocks but found that, in this case, the biggest clues came from the slightly less iron-loving tungsten. The rocks contain more of one variety of tungsten, known as tungsten-182, than expected. That isotope forms from the radioactive decay of hafnium-182, which existed only during Earth’s first 50 million years. The Greenland rocks thus serve as a sort of time capsule that helps reveal the history of the early solar system, Rizo, Walker and colleagues wrote in February in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.
“We believe we are accessing parts of Earth’s mantle that formed and took on some of their chemical characteristics while the Earth was still growing,” Walker says. “You can call it accessing a building block of the Earth.”
Studies of these remnants of the ancient planet suggest that Earth’s mantle has remained chemically patchy. Like lumps of flour in poorly mixed cake batter, clumps of primordial material, with higher amounts of tungsten-182, are studded throughout a smoother, more evenly mixed matrix. That’s surprising because researchers thought that the hot, churning insides of the Earth would have stirred everything around over the course of billions of years. Somehow portions of the mantle resisted the planet’s best blending efforts, Walker reported in June at the Goldschmidt geochemistry meeting in Yokohama, Japan.
By studying where those patches are and what they are made of, researchers can investigate such questions as how much convection there was inside the early Earth, and whether any volcanoes today tap into this primordial material. In May, for instance, Walker’s team reported that it had used siderophile elements to identify geochemically primitive lavas in Canada’s Baffin Bay and in the South Pacific (SN: 6/11/16, p. 13).
Ancient rocks in Isua, Greenland, date back to more than 3.8 billion years ago. Siderophile elements in these rocks bear witness to geological processes in the planet’s first 50 million years.
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Like the ancient Greenland crust, these rocks also had an overabundance of tungsten-182. Apparently the Canadian and Pacific volcanoes tapped into a deep reservoir of primordial material, which flowed up through the throat of a volcano and out onto the surface. Studying the iron-loving elements in those rocks is like taking a siderophile time machine into the past and seeing what the Earth was like 4.5 billion years ago.
“It never ceases to amaze me what the rocks can tell,” says Amy Riches, a geochemist at Durham University in England.
A dusting from space
Highly siderophile elements can teach about more than just the planet Earth. They can reveal secrets about the history of the moon, Mars and other nearby planetary bodies. That’s because all the worlds in the inner solar system apparently got a dusting of gold, platinum and other highly siderophile elements during meteorite bombardments around 4 billion years ago.
The early solar system was something of a cosmic shooting gallery. After the planets coalesced, there were still a lot of leftover space rocks careening around. One enormous impact is thought to have smashed the Earth and spalled off enough debris to form the moon. Other, smaller impacts continued to pummel the inner planets for the first half-billion years or so of their existence. Each collision would have brought a little more fresh material to each world.
On Earth, meteorite impacts could have delivered half a percent to 1 percent of the planet’s total mass. Many meteorites that fall to Earth and are analyzed contain relatively high amounts of highly siderophile elements, which suggests that meteorites hitting the early Earth would have carried a lot of them, too. If so, then the cosmic smashups regularly showered Earth with a fresh coating of gold, platinum and other precious elements. By this time, Earth had already finished forming its core, so the highly siderophile elements remained sprinkled throughout its upper layers rather than being vacuumed into its depths.
This “late accretion” of fresh material could help explain a long-standing puzzle. The amounts of highly siderophile elements in Earth’s mantle are higher than predicted, according to laboratory experiments that try to mimic how molten metal separated from rock as Earth was forming. But a shower of meteorites hitting soon after core formation stopped could have done the trick, a process that Day, Walker and Alan Brandon of the University of Houston discuss in the January Reviews in Mineralogy & Geochemistry.
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