Other
Scientific paper
Mar 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006psrd.repte.103t&link_type=abstract
Planetary Science Research Discoveries
Other
Mars, Magma Ocean, Planetary Formation
Scientific paper
It seems almost certain that the Moon was surrounded by an ocean of magma when it formed. This important idea has been applied to the other terrestrial planets and even to asteroids. Linda (Lindy) Elkins-Tanton and colleagues Mark Parmentier, Paul Hess, and Sarah Zaranek at Brown University, and Lars Borg and David Draper (University of New Mexico) have examined the chemical and physical consequences of magma ocean crystallization on Mars. Elkins-Tanton has focused on the fate of the pile of crystals created during solidification of a magma ocean over a thousand kilometers thick. Crystallization causes the minerals that form first to lie beneath those formed later. The deepest minerals are also less dense than the overlying minerals. This is an unstable situation: the low-density rocks would have a tendency to rise while the high-density rocks would have a tendency to sink. Although we think of rocks as solid and hard, when hot and under pressure, they flow like liquids. They do not flow fast, but they do flow like ultra-gooey liquids (about a factor of 100 million billion times gooier than ketchup at room temperature). Thus, the heavy layers sink and the light layers rise, producing a complicated Martian mantle with chemical characteristics like those cosmochemists infer from studies of Martian meteorites. The sinking of relatively cool rocks from the top of the crystallized pile cools the boundary between the metallic core and the mantle, causing motions inside the core to produce the early, strong magnetic field of Mars.
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