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Planetary geochemistry

Oxygen-rich melt in deep magma oceans

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 392–393 (2023)Cite this article

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High pressures may have enabled ferric iron-rich silicate melts to coexist with iron metal near the base of magma oceans early in the history of large rocky planets like Earth. This suggests a relatively oxygen-rich atmosphere during the late stages of core formation on these planets.

Earth has had an oxygen-rich surface for the past 2.5 billion years (Gyr). This is related to oxygen photosynthesis and possibly Earth’s mantle being more oxidized than other known mantles of smaller terrestrial planetary bodies, such as Mars1. Yet Earth, like most terrestrial planetary bodies, is thought to have formed with a highly reduced primordial mantle. Internal oxidation has thus taken place in Earth’s mantle, but it remains unclear when and how this occurred. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Kuwahara et al.2 propose that mantle oxidation occurred very early on, when Earth had a magma ocean more than 1,000 km deep, because the pressures near the magma ocean floor were sufficiently high that oxygen-rich silicate melts coexisted with reduced iron metal. Mixing the deep silicate melts into the rest of the magma ocean may have supported more oxidized surface conditions than the present-day.

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Fig. 1: Effects of magma ocean size on planetary oxidation state and atmospheric composition.

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  1. Institut des Sciences de la Terre d’Orléans, CNRS/Université d’Orléans/BRGM, Orléans, France

    Fabrice Gaillard

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  1. Fabrice Gaillard
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Correspondence to Fabrice Gaillard.

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Gaillard, F. Oxygen-rich melt in deep magma oceans. Nat. Geosci. 16, 392–393 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01178-3

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