Water-Rock Interactions in Carbonaceous Chondrite Parent Bodies

Mathematics – Logic

Scientific paper

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6205 Asteroids

Scientific paper

Carbonaceous chondrites (CCs) form the most primitive class of meteorites and are vestiges of the planetesimals that formed the building blocks of the planets. Consequently, they possess a wealth of information pertaining to the early solar system. Carbonaceous chondrite parent bodies (CCPBs) are the bodies in which the CCs acquired their current chemical and mineralogical characteristics. There is abundant evidence that 4.5 billion years ago liquid water circulated through the parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrites, interacted with the rock, and produced secondary minerals. As a result, understanding the role of hydrothermal circulation in altering CCPBs is key to determining the information about the early solar system contained in CCs. We have previously investigated hydrothermal convection in CCPBs without water-rock interactions. These numerical simulations of the thermal evolution and hydrothermal circulation of CCPBs indicate a period of several million years during which convective motion of water can occur. The simulations also clearly indicate heterogeneous distributions of water flow and temperature in a CCPB. Some regions of a CCPB experience no pore water flow while other regions experience hundreds of pore volumes of liquid water flow. The spatial heterogeneity in pore water flow suggests that heterogeneous alteration of the body is possible. Accordingly, hydrothermal alteration of minerals inside the parent body could vary greatly with location in the body; thus, one parent body could be the source of chemically diverse meteorites contrary to the general assumption that CC meteorites of different chemical groups come from distinct parent bodies. We have extended our previous simulations to include the effects of water-rock reactions in order to determine the pattern of mineral heterogeneity in CCPBs. Different rates for the relevant reactions could strongly influence the mineral heterogeneity. Therefore, different reaction rate models based on both laboratory and field observations will be tested. The mineralization results will be compared to data from CCs.

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