Volatile Element Behavior During Melting and Vaporisation on Earth and Protoplanets.
Abstract
During accretion the Earth and many of the smaller bodies which were added to it, underwent periods of partial melting, vaporisation and re-condensation. This resulted in patterns of volatile element depletion relative to CI chondrite which are difficult to interpret. The behavior of moderately volatile elements (Pb, Cd, Zn,Cu, In,Tl etc) during these melting, vaporisation and condensation processes is usually approximated by the temperature of condensation from a gas of solar composition. Thus, Tl and In have low condensation temperatures and are regarded as the most volatile of this group. In order to test this volatility approximation we have studied the vaporisation behavior of 13 elements (Ag,Bi,Cd,Cr,Cu,Ga,Ge,In,Pb,Sb,Sn,Tl,Zn) from molten basalt at 1 atm pressure and oxygen fugacities between Ni-NiO and 2 log units below Fe-FeO. The relative volatilities of the elements turn out to be only weakly correlated with condensation temperature, indicating that the latter is a poor proxy for volatility on molten bodies. Cu, Zn and In for example all have similar volatility in the oxygen fugacity range of concern, despite the condensation temperature of Cu (1037K at 10-4bar) being 500K greater than that of In. The oxygen fugacity dependence of volatility indicates that the volatile species are, for all elements more reduced than the melt species. We addressed the differences between condensation temperature and relative volatility in 2 steps. Firstly we used metal-silicate partitioning experiments to estimate the activity coefficients of the trace element oxides in silicate melts. We then used available thermodynamic data to compute the vapor pressures of the stable species of these 13 elements over the silicate melt at oxygen fugacities ranging from Ni-NiO to about 6 log units below Fe-FeO, which approximates the solar gas. Thus we find that presence of Cl and S in the solar gas and the stable Cl and S species of In,Tl Ga Ge Cd and Sn are important contributing factors to volatility in the solar nebula. Our measured volatilities from silicate melt under reducing (S and Cl-absent) conditions are consistent with abundances in the silicate Earth, indicating that these moderately volatile elements were added to Earth in bodies which had undergone episodes of melting and vaporisation.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.V14B..02W
- Keywords:
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- 1060 Planetary geochemistry;
- GEOCHEMISTRY;
- 3630 Experimental mineralogy and petrology;
- MINERALOGY AND PETROLOGY;
- 6299 General or miscellaneous;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS;
- 5480 Volcanism;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLID SURFACE PLANETS