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Geochemistry

Sulphur from heaven and hell

Nature volume 501, pages 175–176 (2013)Cite this article

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Fingerprints of sulphur isotopes in rocks from the ridge beneath the Atlantic Ocean suggest that a substantial fraction of sulphur at Earth's surface is left over from the formation of the planet's core. See Letter p.208

The relative abundances and isotopic signatures of sulphur found in rocks exhumed from Earth's mantle act as fingerprints of how and where our planet acquired its complement of this biochemically important element. Textbooks say that Earth's sulphur has the same isotopic composition as chondrites, a type of meteorite that is thought to best represent the building blocks of terrestrial planets. With dashes of audacity and insight, Labidi and co-workers1 question this assumption in a paper on page 208 of this issue. They report measurements of rocks derived from Earth's mantle that reveal isotopic patterns unlike any others previously reported, with implications for how the planet formedFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: Abundances of elements in Earth's mantle and in chondritic meteorites.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion1 were published online on 4 September 2013.

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  1. Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the Enrico Fermi Institute, Nicolas Dauphas is in the Origins Laboratory, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.,

    Nicolas Dauphas

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Correspondence to Nicolas Dauphas.

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Dauphas, N. Sulphur from heaven and hell. Nature 501, 175–176 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12554

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