Unlike conspiracy theories, the core of the earth is not hollow. The dense, hot ball Instead, a stew of precious metals, including platinum, Ruthenium and almost all gold from the planet, contains. No matter how lucrative that sounds, there is essentially no way in which humanity will ever access this natural treasury buried, including more than 1,850 feet solid rock. But according to recent discoveries on volcanoes in Hawai’i, traces of some of those coveted metals from the deepest corners of the planet are seeping.
“When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally hit gold,” Nils Messling, a geochemist at the University of Göttingen, said in a statement. “Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, leaks in the mantle of the earth.”
Messling and employees explained their findings in a study published on 21 May in the magazine Nature. The team recently detected track quantities of the precious metal Ruthenium while analyzing volcanic rock samples collected over the islands of Hawai’i. More specifically, they noticed the unexpected presence of the ruthenium isotope, goes as much.
“Unexpected” is the keyword there. Although Âą courses exists in the mantle of the earth, it is slightly more abundant in the core – at the other location of 99.999 percent of the gold and other precious metals of the planet. That is because during the planet’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, part of the ruthenium that was in the core of the earth, from another source comes from the small amount found in the cloak today. The discrepancies between these two forms of ruthenium are so small that the equipment used by geologists to study these isotopes has not been able to tell the two apart.
However, researchers from Göttingen University in the Netherlands have recently developed new isotopic analysis methods with which they could do exactly that. When distinguishes between these two types of the same isotope, the team discovered that some of the volcanic basalt of Hawai’i contains an unusually high ÂĽ €ccu signal, which means that it must come from the core-coat-bound.
The consequences are important: the core of the earth, once inaccessible, is at least small quantities thrown to the surface during volcanic eruptions.
“We can now also prove that huge amounts of super-heated mantel material and other hundreds of Quadrillion Metric Ton rock-on-the-ranking boundary and rise to the earth’s surface to form Oceans Islands such as Hawaii,” said Co-author Matthias Wilbold.
The question is not now as This unexpected process happens – it’s a matter of If and when It happened in the past.
“Our findings open a whole new perspective on the evolution of the inner dynamics of our home planet,” Messling added.
