Mare Basalts as Mantle Probes: Dichotomies Between Remotely Gathered and Sample Data

Details Mare Basalts as Mantle Probes: Dichotomies Between Remotely Gathered and Sample Data Mare Basalts as Mantle Probes: Dichotomies Between Remotely Gathered and Sample Data

Jan 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998nvmi.conf...57n&link_type=abstract

Workshop on New Views of the Moon: Integrated Remotely Sensed, Geophysical, and Sample Datasets, p. 57

Mathematics

Logic

Basalt, Igneous Rocks, Lunar Core, Lunar Mantle, Lunar Rocks, Magma, Lunar Evolution, Lunar Crust, Mineralogy, Remote Sensing, Volcanology

Scientific paper

Mare basalts and pyroclastic glasses allow our only petrologic look at the lunar mantle, as bonafide mantle xenoliths are not present in the existing lunar sample collection. Knowledge thus gleaned demonstrates that the there was an early "lunar magma ocean" (LMO), the cooling of which produced an igneous cumulate mantle forming source regions for mare basalts. More sophisticated models demonstrated that late-stage ilmenite-rich cumulates would be denser than early cumulates and sink, or cause limited to full-scale overturn of the cumulate pile. Still under debate is the scale of the LMO: Was this whole Moon melting or only the outer about 400 km? If whole Moon melting is invoked, then differentiation of the Moon into a flotation plagioclase-rich crust, a mafic mineral cumulate mantle, and an Fe-rich core is more easily facilitated. Some have suggested that the lunar core is made up of the dense, ilmenite-rich late-stage cumulates from the lunar magma ocean because the material that formed the Moon came primarily from already differentiated Earth mantle, so it would not contain enough Fe to form a metallic Fe core. How can mare volcanism be used to constrain such models?

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