Unlike conspiracy theories, the heart of the earth is not hollow. THE dense and hot ball Rather, contains a praise of precious metals, in particular platinum, ruthenium and almost all the gold on the planet. As lucrative as it may seem, there is essentially no means that humanity will never access this natural treasure chest buried under more than 1,850 feet of solid rock. But according to recent discoveries made in volcanoes in Hawai'i, the traces of some of these coveted metals infiltrate the deepest scope of the planet.
“When the first results arrived, we realized that we had literally struck gold”, Nils Messling, geochemist at the University of Göttingen, said in a press release. “Our data has confirmed that the material of the nucleus, including gold and other precious metals, flee in the mantle of the earth above.”
Message and employees explained their results in a study published on May 21 in the journal Nature. The team recently detected traces of precious metal ruthenium while analyzing samples of volcanic rocks collected through the Hawaii islands. More specifically, they noted the unexpected presence of the Ruthenium isotope, ¹⁰⁰ru.
“Unexpected” is the keyword there. While ¹⁰⁰ru exists in the mantle of the earth, it is slightly more abundant inside the nucleus – 99.999% of the gold of the planet and other precious metals. Indeed, during the formation of the planet about 4.5 billion years ago, part of the ruthenium locked up inside the heart of the earth came from a source different from the small quantity found in the coat today. The differences between these two forms of ruthenium are so light that the equipment used by geologists to study these isotopes has not been able to separate them.
However, researchers at the University of Göttingen in the Netherlands recently developed new methods of isotopic analysis that allowed them to do exactly. By differentiating these two types of the same isotope, the team discovered that some of the Hawai'i volcanic basalts contain an unusually high signal, which means that it had to come from the nucleus limit.
The ramifications are significant: the core of the earth, once considered to be inaccessible, is ejected at least small quantities towards the surface during volcanic eruptions.
“We can now also prove that huge volumes of super -heated coat materials – hundreds of hundreds of metric quadrillions of rock – originally at the border of the mantle in the heart and ride on the surface of the earth to form the oceanic islands like Hawaii,” added the co -author of the Matthias Wilbold study.
The question is not now if This unexpected process occurs – it is a question of If and when It happened in the past.
“Our results open up an entirely new perspective on the evolution of the interior dynamics of our original planet,” added Messling.
