The Multifarious Martian Mantle

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Scientific paper

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Mars, Meteorites, Martian Meteorites, Martian Mantle

Scientific paper

Pieces of relatively young lava flows from Mars (all less than 600 million years old) preserve a record of the planet's initial segregation into core, mantle, and crust. Research by Lars Borg (University of New Mexico), his colleague David Draper, and his former colleagues at the Johnson Space Center, Chris Herd (University of Alberta, Canada), and Cyrena Goodrich (formerly at the University of Hawaii and now at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York) shows that there are distinctive regions in the interior of Mars. These regions, or reservoirs as cosmochemists like to call them, formed early, about 4.5 billion years ago, and come in two flavors. One, dubbed "enriched," contains high concentrations of trace elements, has a high ratio of lanthanum to ytterbium (La/Yb), high strontium-87 to strontium-86 ratio, a low ratio of neodynmium-143 to neodynmium-144, and is relatively oxidized. The other, dubbed "depleted," contains lower levels of trace elements, has lower La/Yb and strontium-87 to strontium-86, higher neodynmium-143 to neodynmium-144, and is relatively reduced (much less oxidizing than the enriched reservoir). There are mixtures in between these extremes. The reservoirs may have formed in a global magma ocean. Their preservation for 4.5 billion years indicates that Mars, in contrast to Earth, did not have active plate tectonics since the reservoirs formed.

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