Billions of years ago, the early solar system was a swirling disk of gas and dust that eventually clumped and accumulated to form the earliest meteorites, which in turn merged to form the proto Earth and its neighboring planets.
In this earliest phase, Earth was likely rocky and bubbling with lava. Then, less than 100 million years later, a Mars-sized meteorite slammed into the infant planet in a singular "giant impact" event that completely scrambled and melted the planet's interior, effectively resetting its chemistry. Whatever original material the proto Earth was made from was thought to have been altogether transformed.
But the MIT team's findings suggest otherwise. The researchers have identified a chemical signature in ancient rocks that is unique from most other materials found in the Earth today. The signature is in the form of a subtle imbalance in potassium isotopes discovered in samples of very old and very deep rocks. The team determined that the potassium imbalance could not have been produced by any previous large impacts or geological processes occurring in the Earth presently.
The most likely explanation for the samples' chemical composition is that they must be leftover material from the proto Earth that somehow remained unchanged, even as most of the early planet was impacted and transformed.
"This is maybe the first direct evidence that we've preserved the proto Earth materials," says Nicole Nie, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. "We see a piece of the very ancient Earth, even before the giant impact. This is amazing because we would expect this very early signature to be slowly erased through Earth's evolution."
The study's other authors include Da Wang of Chengdu University of Technology in China, Steven Shirey and Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, Bradley Peters of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and James Day of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
Isotopes are slightly different versions of an element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. The element potassium can exist in one of three naturally-occurring isotopes, with mass numbers (protons plus neutrons) of 39, 40, and 41, respectively. Wherever potassium has been found on Earth, it exists in a characteristic combination of isotopes, with potassium-39 and potassium-41 being overwhelmingly dominant. Potassium-40 is present, but at a vanishingly small percentage in comparison.
Nie and her colleagues discovered that the meteorites they studied showed balances of potassium isotopes that were different from most materials on Earth. This potassium anomaly suggested that any material that exhibits a similar anomaly likely predates Earth's present composition. In other words, any potassium imbalance would be a strong sign of material from the proto Earth, before the giant impact reset the planet's chemical composition.
"In that work, we found that different meteorites have different potassium isotopic signatures, and that means potassium can be used as a tracer of Earth's building blocks," Nie explains.
"If this potassium signature is preserved, we would want to look for it in deep time and deep Earth," Nie says.
The team first dissolved the various powder samples in acid, then carefully isolated any potassium from the rest of the sample and used a special mass spectrometer to measure the ratio of each of potassium's three isotopes. Remarkably, they identified in the samples an isotopic signature that was different from what's been found in most materials on Earth.
Specifically, they identified a deficit in the potassium-40 isotope. In most materials on Earth, this isotope is already an insignificant fraction compared to potassium's other two isotopes. But the researchers were able to discern that their samples contained an even smaller percentage of potassium-40. Detecting this tiny deficit is like spotting a single grain of brown sand in a bucket rather than a scoop full of of yellow sand.
The team found that, indeed, the samples exhibited the potassium-40 deficit, showing that the materials "were built different," says Nie, compared to most of what we see on Earth today.
But could the samples be rare remnants of the proto Earth? To answer this, the researchers assumed that this might be the case. They reasoned that if the proto Earth were originally made from such potassium-40-deficient materials, then most of this material would have undergone chemical changes - from the giant impact and subsequent, smaller meteorite impacts - that ultimately resulted in the materials with more potassium-40 that we see today.
The team used compositional data from every known meteorite and carried out simulations of how the samples' potassium-40 deficit would change following impacts by these meteorites and by the giant impact. They also simulated geological processes that the Earth experienced over time, such as the heating and mixing of the mantle. In the end, their simulations produced a composition with a slightly higher fraction of potassium-40 compared to the samples from Canada, Greenland, and Hawaii. More importantly, the simulated compositions matched those of most modern-day materials.
The work suggests that materials with a potassium-40 deficit are likely leftover original material from the proto Earth.
Curiously, the samples' signature isn't a precise match with any other meteorite in geologists' collections. While the meteorites in the team's previous work showed potassium anomalies, they aren't exactly the deficit seen in the proto Earth samples. This means that whatever meteorites and materials originally formed the proto Earth have yet to be discovered.
"Scientists have been trying to understand Earth's original chemical composition by combining the compositions of different groups of meteorites," Nie says. "But our study shows that the current meteorite inventory is not complete, and there is much more to learn about where our planet came from."
Research Report:"Potassium-40 isotopic evidence for an extant pre-giant-impact component of Earth's mantle"
Related Links
Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Lands Beyond Beyond - extra solar planets - news and science
Life Beyond Earth
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
