Mantle differentiation and chemical cycling in the Archean (Invited)

Differentiation of Earth’s silicate mantle is largely controlled by solid-state convection. Today, upwelling mantle leads to decompression melting. Melts, being of low density, rise to form the continental and oceanic crusts. Because many trace elements, such as heat-producing U, Th and K, as well as the noble gases, preferentially partition into melts, melt extraction concentrates these elements into the crust or atmosphere. However, one by-product of whole-mantle convection is that melting during the Earth’s first billion years was likely deep and hot. Such high pressure melts may have been dense, allowing them to stall, crystallize and later founder back into the lower mantle. These sunken lithologies would have ‘primordial’ chemical signatures despite a non-primordial origin. As the Earth cools, the proportion of upwards melt segregation relative to downwards melt segregation increases, removing volatiles and other incompatible elements to the surface. Recycling of these elements back into the Earth’s interior occurs by subduction, but because of chemical weathering, hydrothermal alteration and photosynthetic reactions occurring in the Earth’s exosphere, these recycled materials may re-enter the mantle already chemically transformed. In particular, photosynthetic production of oxygen and, especially, the progressive oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere require removal of reduced carbon from the Earth’s surface. If such removal occurred by subduction, the mantle would have become progressively reduced. During the Archean and early Proterozoic, much of this material may have contributed to making cratonic mantle, and if so, cratonic mantle may have been assembled by reduced building blocks, perhaps explaining the origin of diamonds with organic carbon isotopic signatures. The origin of peridotitic diamonds in cratonic mantle could then be explained if the underlying convecting mantle was in fact more oxidizing such that carbonatitic liquids rising into overlying lithosphere encounter a redox front that reduces carbonate species to elemental carbon.