Category: Planetary, extraterrestrial geology, and meteoritics

Can a supernova affect the Earth System?

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The easy answer is yes, simply because chemical elements with a greater relative atomic mass than that of iron are thought to be created in supernovae when dying giant stars collapse under their own gravity and then explode. Interstellar dust and gas clouds accumulate their debris. If the clouds are sufficiently dense gravity forms clumps that may become new stars and the planets that surround them. Matter from every once-nearby supernova enters these clouds and thus contributes to the formation of a planet. This was partly proven when pre-solar grains were found in the Murchison meteorite, some of which are as old as 7.5 billion years (Ga) – 3 Ga older than the Solar System (see: Mineral grains far older than the Solar System; January 15, 2020). Murchison is a carbonaceous chondrite, a class of meteorite which likely contributed lots of carbon-based compounds to the early Earth, setting the stage for the emergence of life. It has been estimated that a near-Earth supernova (closer than 1000 light years) would have noticeable effects on the biosphere, mainly because of the effects on atmospheric composition of the associated high-energy gamma-ray burst. That would create sufficient nitrogen oxides to destroy the ozone layer that shields the surface from harmful radiation. There are reckoned to have been 20 nearby supernovae during the last 10 Ma or so from the presence of anomalously high levels of the isotope 60Fe in marine sediment layers on the Pacific floor. Yet there is no convincing evidence that they coincided with detectable extinctions in the fossil record. But supernovae have been suggested as a possible cause of more ancient mass extinctions, such as that at the end of the Ordovician Period (but see: The late-Ordovician mass extinction: volcanic connections; July 2017).

Diorama of an Early Devonian reef with tabulate and rugose corals and trilobites (Credit: Richard Bizley)

The Late Devonian is generally accepted to be one of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinction events. However, unlike the others, the event was a protracted decline in biodiversity, with several extinction peaks). In particular it marked the end of Palaeozoic reef-building corals. Some have put down the episodic faunal decline to the effects of species moving from one marine basin to another as global sea levels fluctuated: much like the effects of the ‘invasion’ of the coral-eating Crown of Thorns sea urchin that has helped devastate parts of the Great Barrier Reef during present-day global warming (see: Late Devonian: mass extinction or mass invasion? January 2012). Recently, attention has switched to evidence for ultra-violet damage to the morphology of spores found in the strata that display faunal extinction; i.e. to the possibility of the ozone layer having been lost or severely depleted. One suggestion has been sudden peaks in volcanic activity, hinted at by spikes in the abundance of mercury of marine sediments. Brian Fields of the University of Illinois, with colleagues from the USA, UK, Estonia and Switzerland, have closely examined the possibility and the testability of a supernova’s influence (Fields. B.D. et al. 2020.  Supernova triggers for end-Devonian extinctions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 117, article 202013774; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013774117).

They propose the deployment of mass-spectrometric analysis for anomalous stable-isotope abundances in the sediments that contain faunal evidence for accelerated extinction, particularly those of 146Sm, 235U and the long-lived plutonium isotope 244Pu (80 Ma hal-life). They suggest that the separation of the extinction into several events, may be a clue to a supernova culprit. A gamma-ray burst would arrive at light speed, but dust – containing the detectable isotopes –  although likely to be travelling very quickly would arrive hundred to thousands of years later, depending on the distance to the supernova. Cosmic rays generated by the supernova, also a possible kill mechanism, given a severely depleted ozone layer, travel about half the speed of light. Three separate arrivals for the products of a single stellar explosion are indeed handy as an explanation for the Late Devonian extinctions. But someone needs to do the analyses. The long-lived  plutonium isotope is the best candidate: even detection of a few atoms in a sample would be sufficient proof. But that would require a means of ruling out contamination by anthropogenic plutonium, such as analysing the interior of fossils. But would even such an exotic discovery prove the sole influence of a galactic even?

Finding Archaean atmospheric composition using micrometeorites

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Modern micrometeorites (about 20 μm in diameter) from deep-sea sediments, with shiny magnetite-rich veneers (Credit: D. E. Brownlee)

The gases making up the Earth’s atmosphere and their relative proportions before 2.5 billion years (Ga) ago are known with very little certainty. Carbonate rocks are rare, indicating that the oceans were more acidic, which implies that they had dissolved more CO2 from the atmosphere, which, in turn implies that there was much more of that gas than in present air. There are few signs of widespread glaciogenic sediments of Archaean age, at a time when the Sun’s energy output is estimated to have been at 70 to 75% of its present level. Without an enhanced greenhouse effect oceans would have been frozen over; so that supports high CO2 concentrations too. The fact that water worn grains of minerals such as uraninite (UO2) and pyrite (FeS2), which are stable only in reducing conditions, occur in Archaean conglomerates is a good indicator that there were only vanishingly small amounts of oxygen in the air. That was not to change until marine photosynthesisers produced enough to overcome the general reducing conditions at the Earth’s surface, marked by the Great Oxidation Event at around 2.4 Ga (see: Massive event in the Precambrian carbon cycle; Earth-logs, January 2012. Search for more articles in sidebar at Earth-logs home page). It was then that ancient soils (palaeosols) became the now familiar red colour because of their content of ferric iron oxides and hydroxides The problem is that reliable numbers cannot be attached to these kinds of observation. A common means of estimating CO2 levels comes from the way in which the gas reacts with silicates as soils form at the land surface, estimated from carbon isotopes in soil carbonate nodules. Since the rise of land plants around 400 Ma ago the distribution of pores (stomata) in fossil leaves provides a more precise estimate: the more CO2 in air the less densely packed are leaf stomata. For the Precambrian we are stuck with estimates based on chemical reactions of minerals with the atmosphere. Until recently, one reaction that must always have been extremely common was overlooked.

When meteorite pass through the atmosphere at very high speed friction heats them to incandescence. Their surfaces not only melt but the minerals from which they are composed react very strongly with air. The reaction products should therefore provide chemical clues to the relative proportions of atmospheric gases. Both oxygen and carbon dioxide are reactive at such temperatures, although nitrogen is virtually inert, yet it tends to buffer oxidation reactions. The rest of the atmosphere comprises noble gases – mainly argon – and by definition they are completely unreactive. Pure-iron micrometeorites collected from 2.7 Ga old sediments in the Pilbara Province of Western Australia are veneered with magnetite (Fe3O4) and wüstite (FeO), thus preserving a record of their passage through the Neoarchaean atmosphere. If the oxidant had been oxygen, for these minerals to form from elemental iron suggests oxygen levels around those prevailing today: clearly defying the abundant evidence for its near-absence during the Archaean. Carbon dioxide is the only candidate. Two studies have produced similar results (Lehmer, O. R. et al. 2020. Atmospheric CO2 levels from 2.7 billion years ago inferred from micrometeorite oxidation. Science Advances, v. 6, article aay4644;  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay4644 and Payne, R.C. et al. 2020. Oxidized micrometeorites suggest either high pCO2 or low pN2 during the Neoarchean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 117 1360 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1910698117). Both use complex modelling of the chemical effects of meteorite entry. Lehmer and colleagues estimated that the Neoarchaean atmosphere contained about 64% CO2, with a surface atmospheric pressure about half that at present. This would be sufficient for a surface temperature of about 30°C achieved by the greenhouse effect, taking into account lower solar heating. The team led by Payne concluded a lower concentration (25 to 50%) and a somewhat cooler planet at that time. Both results suggest ocean water considerably more acid than are today’s. The combined warmth and acidity would have had a fundamental bearing on both the origin, survival and evolution of early life.

See also: Carroll, M. 2020. Meteorites reveal high carbon dioxide levels on early Earth; Yirka, R. Computer model shows ancient Earth with an atmosphere 70 percent carbon dioxide. (both from Phys.org)

Subglacial impact structure: trigger for Younger Dryas?

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Radar microwaves are able to penetrate easily through several kilometres of ice. Using the arrival times of radar pulses reflected by the bedrock at glacial floor allows ice depth to be computed. When deployed along a network of flight lines during aerial surveys the radar returns of large areas can be converted to a grid of cells thereby producing an image of depth: the inverse of a digital elevation model. This is the only means of precisely mapping the thickness variations of an icecap, such as those that blanket Antarctica and Greenland. The topography of the subglacial surface gives an idea of how ice moves, the paths taken by liquid water at its base, and whether or not global warming may result in ice surges in parts of the icecap. The data can also reveal topographic and geological features hidden by the ice (see The Grand Greenland Canyon September 2013).

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Colour-coded subglacial topography from radar sounding over the Hiawatha Glacier of NW Greenland (Credit: Kjaer et al. 2018; Fig. 1D)

Such a survey over the Hiawatha Glacier of NW Greenland has showed up something most peculiar (Kjaer, K.H. and 21 others 2018. A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland. Science Advances, v. 4, eaar8173; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar8173). Part of the ice margin is an arc, which suggests the local bed topography takes the form of a 31km wide, circular depression. The exposed geology shows no sign of a structural control for such a basin, and is complex metamorphic basement of Palaeoproterozoic age. Measurements of ice-flow speeds are also anomalous, with an array of higher speeds suggesting accelerated flow across the depression. The radar image data confirm the presence of a subglacial basin, but one with an elevated rim and a central series of small peaks. These are characteristic of an impact structure that has only been eroded slightly; i.e. a fairly recent one and one of the twenty-five largest impact craters on Earth.. Detailed analysis of raw radar data in the form of profiles through the ice reveals  that the upper part is finely layered and undisturbed. The layering continues into the ice surrounding the basin and is probably of Holocene age (<11.7 ka), based on dating of ice in cores through the surrounding icecap. The lower third is structurally complex and shows evidence for rocky debris. Sediment deposited by subglacial streams where they emerge along the arcuate rim contain grains of shocked quartz and glass, as well as expected minerals from the crystalline basement rocks. Some of the shocked material contains unusually high concentrations of transition-group metals, platinum-group elements and gold; further evidence for impact of extraterrestrial material – probably an iron asteroid that was originally more than 1 km in diameter. The famous Cape York iron meteorite, which weighs 31 t – worked by local Innuit to forge harpoon blades – fell in NW Greenland about 200 km away.

The central issue is not that Hiawatha Glacier conceals a large impact crater, but its age. It certainly predates the start of the Holocene and is no older than the start of Greenland glaciation about 2.6 Ma ago. That only Holocene ice layers are preserved above the disrupted ice that rests immediately on top of the crater raises once again the much-disputed possibility of an asteroid impact having triggered the Younger Dryas cooling event and associated extinctions of large mammals in North America at about 12.9 ka (see Impact cause for Younger Dryas draws flak May 2008). Only radiometric dating of the glassy material found in the glaciofluvial sediments will be able to resolve that particular controversy.

A hint of life on Mars

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We can be certain that life was around on Planet Earth around 3.5 billion years ago, if not before, because unmetamorphosed sedimentary rocks of that age from Western Australia in which stromatolites occur contain a black to brownish, structureless material known as kerogen. The material is a hodgepodge of organic compounds that form during the breakdown of proteins and carbohydrates in living matter. It is the source material for petroleum compounds when kerogen-rich rocks are heated during burial. The vast bulk of organic compounds preserved on Earth are in the form of ancient kerogen, whose mass exceeds that of the living biosphere by about 10 thousand times. A good sign that it does represent ancient life lies in sedimentary kerogen’s depletion in ‘heavy’ 13C compared with 12C (negative values of δ13C), because in metabolising carbon dioxide living cells preferentially use the lighter of these two isotopes. Conceivably, 13C can be removed from inorganic carbon by metamorphic processes, so low values of δ13C in metasediments from West Greenland might be organically derived or, equally, they might not.

At the time of writing, geoscientists specialising in Martian matters had become excited by some results from the geochemical system aboard the surviving functional NASA rover. Curiosity has slowly been making its way up Mount Sharp at the centre of Gale Crater near to Mars’s equator. Analysis of high-resolution images taken from orbit suggest that the rocks forming the mountain are sediments. the lowest and oldest strata are suspected to have been deposited in a crater lake when conditions were warmer and wetter on Mars, about 3 billion years ago. Curiosity was equipped with a drill to penetrate and sample sediment unaffected by ultraviolet radiation that long ago would have destroyed any hydrocarbons exposed at the surface. In late 2016, before the rover had reached the lake sediments, the drill’s controller broke down. Since then, Curiosity had moved on to younger, less promising sediments. More than a year later mission engineers fixed the problem and the rover backtracked to try again. Heating the resulting samples to almost 900°C yields any volatile components as a gas to a mass spectrometer, results from which give clues to the molecules released.

‘Selfie’ of Curiosity rover en route to Mount Sharp. (Credit: NASA)

The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) team report a range of thiophenic, aromatic and aliphatic molecules of compounds of carbon, hydrogen and sulfur (Eigenbrode, J.L and 21 others 2018. Organic matter preserved in 3-billion-year-old mudtsones at Gale crater, Mars. Science, v. 360, p. 1096-1101; doi:10.1126/science.aas9185). The blend of pyrolysis products closely resembles those which form from heated terrestrial kerogens and coals, but also from pyrolysis of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. So, the presence of Martian kerogen is not proven. But the results are so promisingly rich in hydrocarbons that another weapon in SAM’s armoury will be deployed, dissolving organic compounds directly from the drill cuttings. This may provide more convincing evidence of collagen. Yet only when samples are returned to labs on Earth will there be a chance to say one way or the other that there was once life on Mars. The results reported in Science’s 8 June issue will surely add weight to the clamour for the Mars 2020 sample-return mission to be funded. Whether or not there is life on Mars demands a great deal more investment still…

A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook

Impact debris in Britain

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These days reports of geological evidence for asteroid impacts are not regarded with a mixture of disbelief, wonder and foreboding: well, not by geologists anyway. But for such a small area as Britain now to have three of widely different ages and in easily accessible places is pretty good for its brand as the place to visit for practically every aspect of Earth history. The first to be discovered lies at the base of Triassic mudstones near Bristol (see Britain’s own impact) and would need some serious grubbing around at a former construction site. The next to emerge was located in one of the best geological districts in the country at several easily accessed coastal exposures in Northwest Scotland. A glass-rich ejecta layer occurs in the basal Torridonian Stoer Group on Stac Fada, Stoer, Sutherland (UK National Grid Reference 203300, 928400). The most recently found (Drake, S.N. and 8 others 2018. Discovery of a meteoritic ejecta layer containing unmelted impactor fragments at the base of Paleocene lavas, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Geology, v. 46, p. 171-174; doi:10.1130/G39452.1) is on the Inner Hebridean island of Skye at the base of its famous Palaeocene flood basalt sequence (UK National Grid Reference 155371,821112).

View to the northwest across Loch Slapin to the Cuillin Hills of Skye (Central Igneous Complex). The flood basalts beneath which the ejecta layer occurs are just above the trees. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The last is perhaps the most spectacular of the three, as it contains the full gamut of provenance, matched only by material from the drill core into the 66 million year-old Chicxulub crater. The 0.9 m thick debris layer rests directly on mid-Jurassic sandstones beneath Palaeocene basalts of the North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP). The layer contains a basalt clast dated at 61.54 Ma, but is dominantly reminiscent of a pyroclastic ignimbrite flow as it contains glass shards. But there the resemblance ends for the bulk of small clasts are of quartz and K-feldspar, sandstone and gneiss. Zircons extracted from the debris show shock lamellae and give Archaean and Proterozoic ages commensurate with the local basement, but also with the bulk of the Scandinavian and Canadian Shields. So the impact could have been anywhere in such widespread terrains, although the enclosed basalt narrows this down to areas where basement is overlain by lavas of the NAIP. The Skye impactite contains unmelted meteorite fragments in the form of titanium nitrides alloyed with vanadium and niobium, metallic iron-silicon alloy containing exsolved carbon, and manganese sulfide.

Although it may be coincidental, the situation of the ejecta layer immediately beneath the Skye lavas, its containing a clast of basalt whose age corresponds to the oldest flows anywhere in the NAIP is fascinating. But the actual impact site is, as yet, unknown. Even so, the layer provokes thoughts about whether an impact may have been more than spatially related to the large NAIP flood basalt pile, preserved on either side of the North Atlantic. If the event was large, then surely the ejecta should be preserved near the base of the flood basalts elsewhere in NW Britain and further afield

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Hadean potentially fertile for life

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The earliest incontrovertible signs of life on Earth are in the 3.48 billion-year-old Dresser Formation in the Pilbara craton of Western Australia, which take the form of carbon-coated, bubble-like structures in fine-grained silica sediments ascribed to a terrestrial hot-spring environment. In the same Formation are stromatolites that are knobbly, finely banded structures made of carbonates. By analogy with similar structures being produced today by bacterial mats in a variety of chemically stressed environments that are inhospitable for multicelled organisms that might know them away, stromatolites are taken to signify thriving, carbonate secreting bacteria. There are also streaks of carbon associated with wave ripples that may have been other types of biofilm. A less certain record of the presence of life are stromatolite-like features in metasediments from the Isua supracrustal belt of West Greenland, dated at around 3.8 Ga, which also contain graphite with carbon-isotopic signs that it formed from biogenic carbon. Purely geochemical evidence that carbonaceous compounds may have formed in living systems are ambiguous since quite complex hydrocarbons can be synthesised abiogenically by Fischer-Tropsch reactions between carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

At present there is little chance of extending life’s record further back in time than four billion years because the Hadean is mainly represented by pre 4 Ga ages of zircon grains found in much younger sedimentary rocks – resistant relics of Hadean crustal erosion. The eastern shore of Hudson Bay does preserve a tiny (20 km2) patch of metamorphosed basaltic igneous rocks, known as the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt. Dated at 3.77 Ga by one method but 4.28 Ga by another, this could be Hadean. Like the Isua sequence that in Quebec also contains metasediments, including banded ironstones with associated iron-rich hydrothermal deposits. Silica from the vent system shows dramatically lifelike tubules. Yet the ambiguity in dating upsets any claims to genuine Hadean life. There has also been a physical stumbling block to the notion that life may have originated and thrived during the Hadean: the bombardment record.

English: An outcrop of metamorphosed volcanose...
Metamorphosed volcanosedimentary rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq supracrustal belt, Canada. Some of these rocks contain quite convincing examples of fossil cells. (credit: Wikipedia)

While oxygen-isotope data from 4.4 Ga zircons hints strongly at subsurface and perhaps surface water on Earth at that time, continued accretion of large planetesimals would have created the hellish conditions associated with the name of the first Eon in Earth’s history. Liquid water is essential for life to have formed, on top of a supply of the essential biological elements C, H, O, N, P and S. The sheer amount of interstellar dust that accompanied the Hadean impact record would have ensured fertile chemical conditions, but would the surface and near-surface of the early Earth have remained continually wet? Judging by the lunar surface and that of other bodies in the solar system, after the cataclysmic events that formed the Moon, many Hadean impacts on Earth were in the range of 100 to 1000 km across, with a Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB)that not only increased the intensity of projectile delivery but witnessed the most energetic single events such as those that created the lunar maria and probably far larger structures on Earth. The thermal energy, accompanied, by incandescent silicate vapour ejected from craters, may have evaporated oceans and even subsurface water with calamitous consequences for early life or prebiotic chemistry. Until 2017 no researchers had been able to model the energetic of the Hadean convincingly.

After assessing the projectile flux up to and through the LHB, and the consequent impact heating Bob Grimm and Simone Marchi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado modelled the likely thermal evolution of the outer Earth through the Hadean. This allowed them to calculate the likely thermal gradients in the near-surface, the volumes of rock each event would have affected and the times taken for cooling after impacts (Grimm, R.E. & Marchi, S. 2018. Direct thermal effects of the Hadean bombardment did not limit early subsurface habitability. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 485, p. 1-9; doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2017.12.043). They found that subsurface ‘habitability’ would have grown continuously throughout the Hadean, even during the worst events of the LHB. Sterilizing Earth and thus destroying and interrupting any life processes could only have been achieved by ten times more projectiles arriving ten times more frequently over the 600 Ma history of the Hadean and LHB. Although surface water may have been evaporated by impact-flash heating and vaporized silicate ejecta, the subsurface would have been wet at least somewhere on the early Earth. Provided it either originated in or colonised surface sedimentary cover it would have been feasible for life to have survived the Hadean. However, nobody knows how long it would have taken for the necessary accumulation of prebiotic chemicals and to achieve the complex sequence of processes that lead to nucleic acids encapsulated in cells and thus self-replication and life itself.

Ice cliffs on Mars

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An illustration of what Mars might have looked...
An illustration of what Mars might have looked like during an ice age between 2.1 million and 400,000 years ago, when Mars’s axial tilt is believed to have been much larger than today.  (credit: Wikipedia)

For Mars to support life and for life to have emerged there demand water that is readily accessible from the surface. There is evidence that in the distant past liquid water may have flowed across the Martian surface to erode river-like features, some associated with the vast canyon system of Valles Marineris. That feature is thought to have been initiated by tectonic forces and perhaps flowing magma, but it shows definite signs of water erosion. Water in great volume was released during the Noachian phase of Mars’s evolution possibly by major impacts 4100 to 3700 million years ago, during the interval known as the Late Heavy Bombardment). Large tracts of the Martian surface that are more muted than Valles Marineris show topographic features reminiscent of huge braided stream systems. Water may have covered vast, low-lying areas in the planet’s Northern Hemisphere to form an early ocean. Yet today the Red Planet seems extremely dry and its thin atmosphere shows only minute traces of water vapour – it is dominated by carbon dioxide. Results from various rovers deployed across its surface and from Mars orbiting satellites have, however, revealed signs of waterlain sediments and minerals that can only have formed by the breakdown of igneous rocks by water. Signs that liquid water continues to flow occasionally down steep slopes, such as rill-like features and ephemeral darkened patches, have been much disputed.

Mars does have an ice cap at its North Pole that waxes and wanes with its seasons, but rather than melting during Martian ‘summers’ the ice sublimates directly to water vapour. Conversely, the polar ices probably form from frost. Yet, astonishingly, there appear to be active glaciers complete with flow lines and moraines, but chances are that some of them are sediment flows ‘lubricated’ by frost binding together mineral particles and boulders that undergoes pressure-induced regelation. Data from orbiting neutron and gamma-ray spectrometers reveal that between 60°N and 60°S the top metre of Martian soil contains between 2 to 18% of ice, making it akin to terrestrial permafrost. So, contrary to its appearance Mars is rich in water, but almost exclusively in solid form. Until very recently, the bulk was thought to be as a matrix binding together sediments, accessible to future crewed mission in useful volumes only by surface mining. That somewhat pessimistic view has now changed dramatically.

Monochrome HiRISE image of a cliff on Mars (the pinkish swath is a simulated natural colour image – see below). beneath the cliff is a zone of jumbled ground formed by cliff collapses. (credit: NASA)

Careful study of fine resolution imagery from the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at latitudes a little less than 60° has centred on cliffs formed by recent erosion (Dundas, C.M and 11 others 2018. Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes. Science, v. 359, p. 199-201; doi: 10.1126/science.aao1619). Colin Dundas of the US Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona, and US colleagues used the multispectral capacities of HiRISE data to study the composition of sedimentary layers exposed in the cliffs. In eight cases, the cliffs contained layered, almost pure blue ice tens of metres thick and only a few metres below the surface. The cliffs seem to have formed as ice has sublimated where exposed, thereby undermining to sedimentary cover. Below the cliffs are jumbled zones of collapsed material. Being so close to the surface and underlain by apparently ice-free sediments, the layered ice sheets must be geologically quite young.

Simulated natural-colour HiRISE image of a Martian cliff showing nearly pure water ice in blues. Note the layered structure that may represent seasonal variations during the period of ice formation (credit: NASA)

Unlike the Earth, whose axial tilt is stabilised to a large degree by the Moon’s gravity, Mars’s two tiny moons have little effect of this kind. So Mars’s axis wobbles between its current 25° tilt to as much as 45°. This results in large climatic shifts, of which there have been an estimated forty over the last 5 million years. At high tilts solar energy heats up the poles and releases water vapour by accelerated sublimation to be laid down at lower latitudes as frost or snow. Mars’s present tilt suggests that it is experiencing a cold episode so that wind blown dust has covered and preserved mid-latitude ice sheets over tens of thousand years. Nearly pure ice is easier to exploit than permafrost layers. Yet optimism among enthusiasts for a crewed Mars mission and eventual colonisation is tempered by the latitudes of the discoveries. While ready supplies of water from ice and CO2 from the Martian atmosphere give the ingredients for oxygen, methane through catalysis of CO2 and hydrogen, agricultural photosynthesis and all kinds of other useful chemistry, low latitudes offer the most assured solar energy supplies. Latitudes around 55° are frigid and dark during Martian winters; perhaps totally inhospitable. So the remote-sensing search is likely to continue in cliffs closer to the ‘tropics’ of Mars.

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Lid tectonics on Earth

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Geoscientists have become used to thinking of the Earth as being dominated by plate tectonics in which large, rigid plates of lithosphere move across the surface. They are driven mainly by the sinking of cold, densified lithosphere in slabs at subduction zones. The volume of recycled slabs is replaced by continual supply of mafic magma to form oceanic crust at constructive margins. Such a process has long been considered to have reached far back into the Precambrian past and there are lively debates concerning when this modus operandi first arose and what preceded it. Now that we know more about other rocky planets and moons it appears that Earth is the only one on which plate tectonics has occurred. The other, more common, behaviour is dominated by stagnancy, although some worlds evidence volcanism and resurfacing as a result of giant impacts. Their subdued activity has come to be known as ‘lid tectonics’, in which their highly viscous innards slowly convect beneath a rigid, stagnant lid through which thermal energy is lost by convection: they are ‘one-plate’ systems. Although Earth loses internal heat by conduction through plate interiors, a large amount dissipates by convection associated with constructive margins: the oceanic parts of its plates lose heat laterally, as they grow older. Six papers in an advance, online issue of the free-access journal Geoscience Frontiers are concerned with the issue of terrestrial lid-tectonics and whether or not it dominated the Earth repeatedly in its Precambrian history.

A model is emerging for a hot, early Earth that was dominated by a form of lid tectonics (Bédard, J.H. 2018 Stagnant lids and mantle overturns: implications for Archaean tectonics, magmagenesis, crustal growth, mantle evolution, and the start of plate tectonics. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, 19-49; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.01.005). Bedard’s model centres on lithosphere that was so weak because of its temperature that its subduction was impossible. Density of the lithosphere rarely increased above that of the mantle because the necessary mineralogical changes were not achieved – those involved in plate tectonics require low-temperature, high-pressure metamorphism as oceanic lithosphere is driven down at modern subduction zones. Even if such reactions did happen, the lithosphere would have been too weak to sustain slab-pull force and dense lithosphere would have simply ‘dripped’ back to the mantle. Mantle convection in a hotter Earth would have been in the form of large, long-lived upwelling zones rather than the relatively ephemeral and narrow plumes known today. Low density materials resulting from magma fractionation, the precursors of continental crust, would have been shifted willy-nilly across the face of the planet to collide. accrete and undergo repeated partial melting. In Bedard’s view, plate tectonics arose as Earth’s heat production waned below a threshold that permitted rigid lithosphere, probably in the late Archaean, to dominate after 2.5 Ga.

Bédard’s impression of an early Archaean lid-tectonic scenario. (credit: Jean H Bédard 2018, Figure 3B)

A radically different view is that stagnant-lid episodes alternated with periods of limited subduction and plate tectonics in the Archaean. Some Archaean cratons – the so-called ‘granite-greenstone terrains – seems to provide geological evidence for lid tectonics (Wyman, D. 2018. Do cratons preserve evidence of stagnant lid tectonics? Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, 19-49; https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.02.001). Others, such as the famous Isua supracrustal belt in West Greenland hint at plate tectonics. John Piper, of Liverpool University in Britain, argues from a series of Archaean palaeomagnetic polar wander curves that in three periods – ~2650 to 2200 Ma, 1550 to 1250 Ma, and 800 to 600 Ma – the poles shifted comparatively slowly with respect to the cratons providing the magnetic data; a feature that Piper ascribes to dominant lid tectonics (Piper, J.D.A., 2018. Dominant Lid Tectonics behaviour of continental lithosphere in Precambrian Times: palaeomagnetism confirms prolonged quasi-integrity and absence of Supercontinent Cycles. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 61-89; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.07.009). Similarly, there is some evidence based on the geochemical variation of basaltic rocks derived from the mantle. Through the Archaean, geochemical changes roughly follow cycles in the abundance of zircon radiometric ages and other geological changes that may reflect plate- and lid-tectonic episodes (Condie, K.C. 2018. A planet in transition: the onset of plate tectonics on Earth between 3 and 2 Ga? Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 51-60; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2016.09.001). Interestingly, the age-frequency plot of almost three thousand Archaean and Hadean zircons recovered from the famous 1.6 Ga old sandstones of the Jack Hills Formation in Western Australia reveals similar cycles that may reflect such tectonic fluctuations in the Hadean (Wang, Q. & Wilde, S.A. 2017. New constraints on the Hadean to Proterozoic history of the Jack Hills belt,Western Australia. Gondwana Research, v. 55, p. 74-91; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2017.11.008). Since zircons are most likely to crystallize from intermediate and felsic magmas – i.e. precursors of continental material – their abundance in the Jack Hills rocks suggests that their source must have been in the 3.7 to 3.3 Ga gneisses on which the younger sediments rest. That is, part of those Archaean gneisses may well be made up of Hadean continental material that was repeatedly reworked and maybe remelted since such crust first appeared (in the form of surviving zircons) around 4.4 to 4.5 Ga, perhaps during vigorous lid-tectonic regimes.

Possible evolution of magmatic and tectonic styles for large silicate planets. (Credit: Stern et al. 2018, Figure 3)

Based on their reassessment of tectonic activity revealed by 8 rocky planets and moons Robert Stern of the University of Texas (Dallas) and colleagues from ETH-Zurich suggest a possible evolutionary sequence of tectonics and magmatism that Earth-like bodies might go through (Stern, R.J. et al. 2018. Stagnant lid tectonics: Perspectives from silicate planets, dwarf planets, large moons, and large asteroids. Geoscience Frontiers, v. 9, p. 103-119 ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2017.06.004). In their scheme plate tectonics requires certain conditions of lithospheric density and strength to evolve and suggest that, depending on planetary characteristics, slab-pull driven tectonics is likely to be preceded and followed by stagnant lid tectonics, to give perhaps a cyclical geotectonic history.

A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook

Banded iron formations (BIFs) reviewed

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During most of the last hundred years every car body, rebar rod in concrete, ship, bridge and skyscraper frame had its origins in vividly striped red rocks from vast open-pit mines. Comprising mainly iron oxides with some silica, these banded iron formations, or BIFs for short, occur in profitable tonnages on every continent.

This image shows a 2.1 billion years old rock ...
2.1 billion years old boulder of banded ironstone. (credit: Wikipedia)

This article can now be read in full at Earth-logs in the Sedimentology and stratigraphy archive for 2017

Mega-impacts and tectonics

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Because they are fast as well as weighty, destination-Earth asteroids and comets pack quite a punch. That is because their kinetic energy is proportional to the square of their speed (at least 13 km s-1) as well as half their mass. So, even all one half a kilometre across carries an energy a hundred times the solar energy received by Earth in a year, and a great deal more when compared with geothermal heat production. Much of the focus on the effects of impact events has dwelled on the upper crust, the oceans and atmosphere. Yet they also have huge seismic effects, with a proportion of their shock effect being dissipated throughout the entire planet. One obvious consequence would be a thermal anomaly directly beneath the crater as well as some thinning of the lithosphere and body waves affecting the rest of the solid Earth.

Thermal and mechanical processes lie at the core of tectonics, so a big question has been ‘Could impacts create mantle plumes or set new tectonic processes in motion?’ There has been speculation of diverse kinds since impacts became popular following the link between the Chicxulub crater and the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, discovered in 1980. But ‘educated guesses’ have generated more hot air than clear conclusions. Much as most of us are modelling-averse, a mathematical approach is the only option in the welcome absence of any severe extraterrestrial battering to which scientists have borne witness. With refined algorithms that cover most of the nuances of projectiles and targets – conservation of mass, energy and momentum in the context of the solid Earth behaving as a viscous medium –  Craig O’Neill and colleagues at Macquairie University, Australia, and the Southwest Research Centre in Boulder, CO USA, have simulated possible tectonic outcomes during plausible bombardment scenarios during the Hadean (O’Neil, C. et al. 2017. Impact-driven subduction on the Hadean Earth. Nature Geoscience, v. 10, p. 793-797; DOI: 10.1038/NGEO3029).

It appears that truly gargantuan objects – radius >500 km – are required to stimulate sufficient thermal anomalies that would lead to mantle upwellings whose evolution might lead to subduction at their margins. One at the limit posed by lunar cratering history (~1700 km radius) could have resulted in wholesale subduction of the entire lithosphere present at the time about 4 Ma after the impact. In the Hadean, it is likely that the lithosphere would have had a roughly mantle composition, so that the density excess needed for slab descent would have been merely temperature dependent. Note: after the onset of a basalt-capped lithosphere heat flow would have needed to be below the limit at which basalt converts to eclogite at high pressures, and thus to a density greater than that of the mantle, for continuing subduction. The authors’ Hadean scenario is one of episodic subduction dependent on the projectile flux and magnitude; i.e. with an early Hadean with stop-start subduction waning to tectonic stagnation and then a restart during the Late Heavy Bombardment after 4.1 Ga. Evidence for this is clearly scanty, except for Hadean zircons, whose presence indicates differentiation of early magmas with a peak between 4.0 to 4.2 Ga, in which magnetic intensities are preserved that are roughly as predicted by the scenario.

No impacts preserved in Precambrian to Recent times suggest extraterrestrial objects with the power to induce significant changes to global tectonics.

The winter of dinosaurs’ discontent

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Under the auspices of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), during April and May 2016 a large team of scientists and engineers sank a 1.3 km deep drill hole into the offshore, central part of the Chicxulub impact crater, which coincided with the K-Pg mass extinction event. Over the last year work has been underway to analyse the core samples aimed at investigating every aspect of the impact and its effects. Most of the data is yet to emerge, but the team has published the results of advanced modelling of the amount of climate-affecting gases and dusts that may have been ejected (Artemieva, N. et al. 2017. Quantifying the release of climate-active gases by large meteorite imp-acts with a case study of Chicxulub. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 44; DOI: 10.1002/2017GL074879).  . From petroleum exploration in the Gulf of Mexico the impact site is known to have been underlain by about 2.5 to 3.5 km of Mesozoic sediments that include substantial amounts of limestones and evaporitic anhydrite (CaSO4) – thicknesses of each are of the order of a kilometre. The impact would inevitably have yielded huge volumes of carbon- and sulfur dioxide gases, as well as water vapour plus solid and molten ejecta. The first, of course, is a critical greenhouse gas, whereas SO2 would form sulfuric acid aerosols if it entered the stratosphere. They are known to block incoming solar radiation. So both warming and cooling influences would have been initiated by the impact. Dust-sized ejecta that lingered in the atmosphere would also have had climatic cooling effects. The questions that the study aimed to answer concerns the relative masses of each gas that would have reached more than 25 km above the Earth to have long-term, global climatic effects and whether the dominant effect on climate was warming or cooling. Both gases would have added the environmental effects of making seawater more acid.

Chicxulub2
3-D simulation of the Chicxulub crater based on gravity data (credit: Wikipedia)

Such estimates depend on a large number of factors beyond the potential mass of carbonate and sulfate source rocks. For instance: how big the asteroid was; how fast it was travelling and the angle at which it struck the Earth’s surface determine the kinetic energy involved and the impact mechanism. How that energy was distributed between atmosphere, seawater and the sedimentary sequence, together with the pressure-temperature conditions for the dissociation of calcite and anhydrite all need to be accounted for by modelling. Moreover, the computation itself becomes extremely long beyond estimates for the first second or so of the impact. Earlier estimates had been limited by computer speeds to only the first few seconds of the impact and could not allow for other than vertical impacts. The new study, by supercomputers and improved algorithms, used a likely 60° angle of impact, new data on mineral decomposition and simulated the first 15 to 30 seconds. The results suggested that 325 ± 130 Gt of sulfur and 425 ± 160 Gt CO2 were ejected, compared with earlier estimates of 40-560 Gt of sulfur and 350-3,500 Gt of CO2.  The greater proportion of sulfur release to the stratosphere pushes the model decisively towards global cooling, probably over a lengthy period – perhaps centuries. Taking dusts into account implies that visible sunlight would also have been blocked, devastating the photosynthetic base of the global food chain, in the sunlit parts of oceans as well as on land.

But we have to remember that these are the results of a theoretical model. In the same manner as this study has thrown earlier modeling into doubt, more data – and there will be a great many from the Chicxulub drill core itself – and more sophisticated computations may change the story significantly. Also, the other candidate for the mass extinction event, the flood basalt volcanism of the Deccan Traps, and its geochemical effects on the climate have yet to be factored in. The next few lines of Shakespeare’s soliloquy for  Richard III may well emerge from future work

… Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried …

See also: BBC News comment on 31 October 201

 

Shock and Er … wait a minute

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Chicxulub2
Enhanced gravity map of the Chicxulub crater (credit: Wikipedia)

Michael Rampino has produced a new book (Rampino, M.R. 2017. Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century. Columbia University Press; New York). As the title subtly hints, Rampino is interested in mass extinctions and impacts; indeed quite a lot more, as he lays out a hypothesis that major terrestrial upheavals may stem from gravitational changes during the Solar System’s progress around the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers reckon that this 250 Ma orbit involves wobbling through the galactic plane and possibly varying distributions of mass – stars, gas, dust and maybe dark matter – in a 33 Ma cycle. Changing gravitational forces affecting the Solar System may possibly fling small objects such as comets and asteroids towards the Earth on a regular basis. In the 1980s and 90s Rampino and others linked mass extinctions, flood-basalt outpourings and cratering events, with a 27 Ma periodicity. So the books isn’t entirely new, though it reads pretty well.

Such ideas have been around for decades, but it all kicked off in 1980 when Luis and Walter Alvarez and co-workers published their findings of iridium anomalies  at the K-Pg boundary and suggested that this could only have arisen from a major asteroid impact. Since it coincided with the mass extinction of dinosaurs and much else besides at the end of the Cretaceous it could hardly be ignored. Indeed their chance discovery launched quite a bandwagon. The iridium-rich layer also included glass spherules, shocked mineral grains, soot and other carbon molecules –nano-scale diamonds, nanotubes and fullerenes whose structure is akin to a geodesic dome – and other geochemical anomalies. Because the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico is exactly the right age and big enough to warrant a role in the K-Pg extinction, these lines of evidence have been widely adopted as the forensic smoking gun for other impacts. In the last 37 years every extinction event horizon has been scrutinized to seek such an extraterrestrial connection, with some success, except for exactly coincident big craters.

The K-Pg event is the only one that shows a clear temporal connection with a small mountain falling out of the sky, most of the others seeming to link with flood basalt events and their roughly cyclical frequency – but hence Rampino’s Shiva hypothesis that impacts may have caused the launch of mantle plumes from the core-mantle boundary. Others have used the ‘smoking gun’ components to link lesser events to a cosmic cause, the most notorious being the 2007 connection to the extinction of the North American Pleistocene megafauna and the start of the Younger Dryas return of glacial conditions. Since 1980 alternative mechanisms for producing most of the impact-connected materials have been demonstrated. It emerged in 2011 that nano-diamonds and fullerenes may form in a candle flame and their global distribution could be due to forest fires. And now it seems that shocked mineral grains can form during a lightning strike (Chen, J. et al. 2017. Generation of shock lamellae and melting in rocks by lightning-induced shock waves and electrical heating. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 44, p. 8757-8768; doi:10.1002/2017GL073843). Shocked or not, quartz and feldspar grains are resistant enough to be redistributed into sediments. Although platinum-group metals, such as iridium, are likely to be mainly locked away in Earth’s core, some volcanic exhalations and many flood basalts – especially those with high titanium contents – significantly are enriched in them. So even the Alvarez’s evidence for a K-Pg impact has an alternative explanation. Rampino is to be credited for acknowledging that in his book.

An awful lot of ideas about rare yet dreadful events in the biosphere depend, like many criminal cases, on the ‘weight of evidence’ and defy absolute proof. The evidence generally permits alternatives, such the cunning Verneshot hypothesis for the extinction-flood basalt connection supported by one of the founders of plate tectonics, W. Jason Morgan. As regards The K-Pg extinction, it is certain that a very large mass did fall on Chicxulub at the time of the mass extinction, whereas the Deccan flood basalts span a million years or so either side. But the jury is out on whether either or both did the deed. For other events of this scale and larger ones the money is on internal origins. As for Rampino’s galactic hypothesis, the statistics are decidedly dodgy, but chasing down more forensics is definitely on the cards.

English: From source; an animation showing the...
Animation showing the Chicxulub Crater impact. ( credit: University of Arizona, Space Imagery Center)
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Wildfires and climate at the K-Pg boundary

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It is now certain that the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary 66 Ma ago coincided with the impact of a ~10 km diameter asteroid that produced the infamous Chicxulub crater north of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Whether or not this was the trigger for the mass extinction of marine and terrestrial fauna and flora – the flood basalts of the Deccan Traps are still very much in the frame – the worldwide ejecta layer from Chicxulub coincides exactly with the boundary that separates the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras. As well as shocked quartz grains, anomalously high iridium concentrations and glass spherules the boundary layer contains abundant elemental carbon, which has been widely ascribed to soot released by vegetation that went up in flames on a massive scale. Atmospheric oxygen levels in the late Cretaceous were a little lower than those at present, or so recent estimates from carbon isotopes in Mesozoic to Recent ambers suggest (Tappert, R. et al. 2013. Stable carbon isotopes of C3 plant resins and ambers record changes in atmospheric oxygen since the Triassic. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, v. 121, p. 240-262,) – other estimates put the level substantially above that in modern air. Whatever, global wildfires occurred within the time taken for the Chicxulub ejecta to settle from the atmosphere; probably a few years. It has been estimated that about 700 billion tonnes of soot were laid down, suggesting that most of the Cretaceous terrestrial biomass and even a high proportion of that in soils literally went up in smoke.

Charles Bardeen and colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have modelled the climatic and chemical effects of this aspect of the catastrophe (Bardeen, C.G. et al. 2017. On transient climate change at the Cretaceous−Paleogene boundary due to atmospheric soot injections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; doi:10.1073/pnas.1708980114). Despite the associated release of massive amounts of CO2 and water vapour by both the burning and the impact into seawater, giving increased impetus to the greenhouse effect, the study suggests that fine-grained soot would have lingered as an all enveloping pall in the stratosphere. Sunlight would have been blocked for over a year so that no photosynthesis would have been possible on land or in the upper ocean, the temperatures of the continent and ocean surfaces would have dropped by as much as 28 and 11 °C respectively to cause freezing temperatures at mid-latitudes. Moreover, absorption of solar radiation by the stratospheric soot layer would have increased the temperature of the upper atmosphere by several hundred degrees to destroy the ozone layer. Consequently, once the soot cleared the surface would have had a high ultraviolet irradiation for around a year.

The main implication of the modelling is a collapse in both green terrestrial vegetation and oceanic phytoplankton; most of the food chain would have been absent for long enough to wipe out those animals that depended on it entirely. While an enhanced greenhouse effect and increased acidification of the upper ocean through CO2 emissions by the Deccan flood volcanism would have placed gradually increasing and perhaps episodic stresses on the biosphere, the outcome of the Chicxulub impact would have been immediate and terrible.

More on mass extinctions and impacts here and here

Steam-bath Earth

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The Earth’s mantle probably contained a significant amount of water from the start. Its earliest history was one of intense bombardment, including the impact that formed the Moon. Together with the conversion of gravitational potential energy to heat while the core was settling out from the mantle, impacts would have kept its overall temperature high enough to prevent water vapour from condensing on the surface until such heat input ceased and heat loss by radiation allowed the surface rapidly to cool. The atmosphere would have been rich in water vapour. Evidence from zircons that are the earliest tangible materials yet recovered hint at the formation of Zr-rich magmas – probably granitic in the broad sense – about 100 Ma after the Moon-forming event (see EPN July 2001: Zircons’ window on the Hadean). Yet no trace of substantial granitic rocks that old have ever been found.

Don Baker and Kassandra Sofonio of McGill University in Montreal, Canada have considered processes other than partial melting or fractional crystallisation that may have been possible during the earliest Hadean. In particular they have looked at one thought once to be a contender in the genesis of granite and latterly sidelined (Baker, D.R. & Sofonio, K. 2017. A metasomatic mechanism for the formation of Earth’s earliest evolved crust. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 463, p. 48-55; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.01.022 ). They heated powdered artificial samples that chemically resembled the Earth’s original silicate mantle in sealed double capsules – an inner part containing the silicate powder and an outer one containing water. The capsules were held at around 727°C for a time and then quenched. The outer part of each capsule was found to be a glass of roughly granite composition. The experimental design ensured that superheated water diffused across the inner-outer capsule wall. So the ‘granite’ must have formed by a metasomatic process – essentially preferential solution of its component elements in supercritical water – the experimental temperature being insufficient to partially melt the ultramafic charge in the inner capsule.

Baker and Sofonio conclude that degassing of this metasomatic fluid – silicate-rich ‘steam’ – may have produced substantial masses of sialic crust on the Earth’s surface. Removal of material produced in such a manner would also have extracted trace elements with an affinity for granite from the early mantle – so-called incompatible elements. The subsequent recycling of such granitic blobs back into the mantle may explain geochemical signs in >500 Ma younger Archaean crust – produced by ‘normal’ igneous processes – of incompatible-element enriched reservoirs in the Early mantle.

A ‘recipe’ for Earth’s accretion, without water

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The Earth continues to collect meteorites, the vast majority of which are about as old as our planet; indeed many are slightly older. So it has long been thought that Earth originally formed by gravitational accretion when the parental bodies of meteorites were much more abundant and evenly distributed. Meteorites fall in several classes, metallic (irons) and several kinds that contain silicate minerals, some with a metallic component (stony irons) others without, some with blebs or chondrules of once molten material (chondrites) and others that do not (achondrites), and more subtle divisions among these general groups. In the latter half of the 20th century geochemists and cosmochemists became able to compare the chemical characteristics of different meteorite classes with that of the Sun –from its radiation spectrum – and those of different terrestrial rocks – from direct analysis. The relative proportions of elements in chondrites turned out to match those in the Sun – inherited from the gas nebula from which it formed – better than did other classes. The best match with this primitive composition turned out to be the chemistry of carbonaceous chondrites that contain volatile organic molecules and water as well as silicates and sulfides. The average chemistry of one sub-class of carbonaceous chondrites (C1) has been chosen as a ‘standard of standards’ against which the composition of terrestrial rocks are compared in order that they can be assessed in terms of their formative processes relative to one another. For a while carbonaceous chondrites were reckoned to have formed the bulk of the Earth through homogeneous accretion: that is until analyses became more precise at increasingly lower concentrations. This view has shifted …

Geochemistry is a complex business(!), bearing in mind that rocks that can be analysed today predominantly come from the tiny proportion of Earth that constitutes the crust. The igneous rocks at the centre of wrangling how the whole Earth has evolved formed through a host of processes in the mantle and deep crust, which have operated since the Earth formed as a chemical system. To work out the composition of the primary source of crustal igneous rocks, the mantle, involves complex back calculations and modelling. It turns out that there may be several different kinds of mantle. To make matters worse, those mantle processes have probably changed considerably from time to time. To work back to the original formative processes for the planet itself faces the more recent discovery that different meteorite classes formed in different ways, different distances from the Sun and at different times in the early evolution of the pre-Solar nebula. Thankfully, some generalities about chemical evolution and the origin of the Earth can be traced using different isotopes of a growing suite of elements. For instance, lead isotopes have revealed when the Moon formed from Earth by a giant impact, and tungsten isotopes narrow-down the period when the Earth first accreted. Incidentally, the latest ideas on accretion involve a series of ‘embryo’ planets between the Moon and Mars in size.

An example of an E-type Chondrite (from the Ab...
An example of an enstatite chondrite (from the Abee fall) in the Gallery of Minerals at the Royal Ontario Museum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Calculating from a compendium of isotopic data from various types of meteorite and terrestrial materials, Nicolas Dauphas of the University of Chicago has convincingly returned attention to a model of heterogeneous accretion of protoplanetary materials from different regions of the pre-Solar nebula (Dauphas, N. 2017. The isotopic nature of the Earth’s accreting material through time. Nature, v. 541, p. 521-524; doi:10.1038/nature20830). His work suggests that the first 60% of Earth’s accretion involved materials that were a mixture of meteorite types, half being a type known as enstatite chondrites. These meteorites are dry and contain grains of metallic iron-nickel alloy and iron sulfides set in predominant MgSiO3 the pyroxene enstatite. The Earth’s remaining bulk accumulated almost purely from enstatite-chondrite material. A second paper in the same issue of Nature (Fischer-Gödde, M. & Kleine, T. 2017. Ruthenium isotopic evidence for an inner Solar System origin of the late veneer. Nature, v. 541, p. 525-527; doi:10.1038/nature21045) reinforces the notion that the final addition was purely enstatite chondrite.

This is likely to cause quite a stir: surface rocks are nothing like enstatite chondrite and nor are rocks brought up from the upper mantle by volcanic activity or whose composition has been back-calculated from that of surface lavas; and where did the Earth’s water at the surface and in the mantle come from? It is difficult to escape the implication of a mantle dominated by enstatite chondrite From Dauphas’s analysis, for lots of other evidence from Earth materials seem to rule it out. One ‘escape route’ is that the enstatite chondrites that survived planetary accretion, which only make up 2% of museum collections, have somehow been changed during later times.  The dryness of enstatite chondrites and the lack of evidence for a late veneer of ‘moist’ carbonaceous chondrite in these analyses cuts down the options for delivery of water, the most vital component of the bulk Earth and its surface.  Could moister meteorites have contributed to the first 60% of accretion, or was  post-accretion cometary delivery to the surface able to be mixed in to the deep mantle? Nature’s News & Views reviewer, Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, offers what may be a grim outlook for professional meteoriticists: that perhaps “the meteorites in our collection are not particularly good examples of Earth’s building blocks” (Carlson, R.W. 2017. Earth’s building blocks. Nature, v. 541, p. 468-470; doi:10.1038/541468a).

Animation of how the Solar System may have formed.

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K-T (K-Pg) boundary impact probed

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One of the most eagerly followed ocean-floor drilling projects has just released some results. Its target is 46 km radially away from the centre of the geophysical anomaly associated with the Chixculub impact structure just to the north of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. In the case of large lunar impact craters the centre is often surrounded by a ring of peaks. Modelling suggests such features are produced by the deep penetration of immense seismic shock waves. In the first minute these excavate and fling out debris to leave a cavity penetrating deep into the crust. Within three minutes the cavity walls collapse inwards creating a rebound superficially similar to the drop flung upwards after an object is dropped in liquid. This, in turn, collapses outwards to emplace smashed and partially melted deep crustal material on top of what were once surface materials, creating a crustal inversion beneath a mountainous ring of Himalayan dimensions that surrounds a by-now shallow crater. That is the story modelled from what is known about well-studied, big craters on the Moon and Mercury. Chixculub is different because the impact was into the sea and involved debris-charged tsunamis that finally plastered the actual impact scar with sediments. The drilling was funded for several reasons, some palaeontological others relating to the testing of theories of impact processes and their products. Chixculub is probably the only intact impact crater on Earth, and the first reports of findings are in the second category (Morgan, J.V. and 37 others 2016. The formation of peak rings in large impact craters. Science, v. 354, p. 878-882; doi: 10.1126/science.aah6561).

English: K/T extinction event theory. An artis...
Artist’s depiction of the Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago that many scientists say is the most direct cause of the dinosaurs’ disappearance (credit: Wikipedia)

The drill core, reaching down to about 1.3 km below the sea floor penetrates post-impact Cenozoic sediments into a 100 m thick zone of breccias containing fragments of impact melt rock, probably the infill of the central crater immediately following the first few minutes of impact. Beneath that are coarse grained granites representing the middle continental crust from original depths around 10 km. The granite is intensely fractured and riven by dykes and pods of impact melt, and contains intensely shocked grains that typify impacts that produce a transient pressure of ~60 GPa – around six hundred thousand times atmospheric pressure. From seismic reflection surveys this crustal material overlies as yet un-drilled Mesozoic sedimentary rocks. Its density is significantly less than that of unshocked granite – averaging 2.4 compared with 2.6 g cm3. So it is probably filled with microfractures and sufficiently permeable for water to have penetrated once the impact site had cooled. This poses the question, yet to be addressed in print, of whether or not this near-surface layer became colonised by microorganisms in the aftermath (Barton, P. 2016. Revealing the dynamics of a large impact. Science, v. 354, p. 836-837). That is, was the surrounding ocean sterilised at the time of the K-T (K-Pg) mass extinction?; an issue whose resolution is awaited with bated breath by the palaeobiology audience. OK; so theory about the physical process of cratering has been validated to some extent, but will later results be more interesting, outside the planetary sciences community?

Read more about impacts here and mass extinctions here .

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Lunar gravity and the Orientale Basin

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Mapping the Earth’s gravitational field once involved painstaking use of highly sensitive gravimeters at points on the surface, then interpolating values in the spaces between. How revealing maps produced in this way are depends on the spacing of the field sites, and that is still highly variable because of accessibility and how much money is available to carry out such a task in different areas. Space-borne methods have been around for decades.  One uses radar measurement of sea-surface height, which depends on the underlying gravitational field. The other deploys two satellites in tandem orbits (the US-German Aerospace Centre Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment – GRACE), the distance between them – measureable using radar –  varying along each orbit according to variations in the Earth’s gravity. Respectively, these methods have produced gravity maps of the ocean floor and estimates melting rates of ice caps and the amount of groundwater extraction from sedimentary basins. The problem with GRACE is that satellites need to avoid the Earth’s atmosphere by using orbits hundreds of kilometres above the surface, otherwise drag soon brings them down. So the resolution of the gravity maps that it produces is too coarse (about 270 km) for most useful applications. If a world has no atmosphere, however, there is no such limit on orbital altitude, other than surface topography. A similar tandem-system to GRACE has been orbiting the Moon at 55 km since 2011. The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has produced full coverage of lunar gravity at a resolution of 20 km. In a later phase of operation, GRAIL has been skimming the tops of the highest mountains on the Moon at an average altitude of 6 km; close enough to give a resolution of between 3 and 5 km.

Lunar Orbiter 4 image of the Mare Orientale ba...
The Mare Orientale basin on the Moon. (credit: Wikipedia)

This capacity has given a completely new take on lunar near-surface structure, about as good as that provided by conventional gravity mapping for parts of the Earth. The first pay-off has been for the best preserved major impact feature on the lunar surface: the Orientale basin that formed at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment of the Solar System, around 3.8 billion years ago. The ~400 km diameter Orientale basin is at the western border of the moon’s disk visible from Earth, and looks like a gigantic bullseye. Its central crater, floored by dark-coloured basalt melted from the mantle by the power of the impact, is surrounded by three concentric rings extending to 900 km across; a feature seen partially preserved around even larger lunar maria. The structure of such giant ringed basins – also seen on other bodies in the Solar System – has been something of a puzzle since their first recognition on the Moon. A popular view has been that they are akin to the rippling produced dropping a pebble in water, albeit preserved in now solid rock.

The Orientale basin superimposed by the strength of the moon's gravity field. Areas shaded in red have higher gravity, while areas in blue have the least gravity. (Credit: Ernest Wright, NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio)
The Orientale basin superimposed by the strength of the moon’s gravity field. Areas shaded in red have higher gravity, while areas in blue have the least gravity. (Credit: Ernest Wright, NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio)

GRAIL has allowed planetary scientists to model a detailed cross section through the lunar crust (Zuber, M.T. and 27 others, 2016. Gravity field of the Orientale basin from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory Mission. Science, v. 354, p. 438-441). The 40 km thick anorthositic (feldspar-rich) lunar crust has vanished from beneath the central crater, which is above a great upwards bulge of the lunar mantle mantled by about 2 km of mare basalts. The shape of the crust-mantle boundary beneath the rings shows that it has been thickened by anorthositic debris flung out by the impact. But the rings seem to be controlled by huge faults that penetrate to the mantle: signs of 2-stage gravitational collapse of the edifice produced initially by the impact.

More on planetary impacts

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Impact linked to the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary event

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The Palaeocene–Eocene (P-E) boundary at 55.8 Ma marks the most dramatic biological changes since the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary 10 million years earlier. They included the rapid expansions of mammals and land plants and major extinction of deep-water foraminifera.  It was a time of sudden global warming (5-10°C in 10-20 ka) superimposed on the general Cenozoic cooling from the ‘hothouse’ of the Cretaceous Period. It coincided with a decrease in the proportion of 13C in marine carbonates.  Because photosynthesis, the source of organic carbon, favours light 12C, such a negative δ13C “spike” is generally ascribed to an unusually high release of organic carbon to the atmosphere.  The end-Palaeocene warming may have resulted from a massive release of methane from gas-hydrate buried in shallow seafloor sediments. But another process may yield such a signature; massive burning of organic material at the land surface. Since its discovery, the P-E thermal maximum has been likened to the situation that we may face should CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning continue to rise without control. Unsurprisingly, funds are more easily available for research on this topic than, say, ‘Snowball Earth’ events.

Climate change during the last 65 million year...
Climate change during the last 65 million years. The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum is labelled PETM. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Three seafloor sediment cores off the east coast of the US that include the P-E boundary have been found to contain evidence for an impact that occurred at the time of the δ13C “spike” (Schaller, M.F. et al. 2016. Impact ejecta at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. Science, v. 354, p. 225-229). The evidence is dominated by tiny spherules and tear-shaped blobs of glass, some of which contain tiny crystals of shocked and high-temperature forms of silica (SiO2). These form part of the suite of features that have been used to prove the influence of asteroid impacts. Two other onshore sites have yielded iridium anomalies at the boundary, so it does look like there was an impact at the time. The question is, was it large enough either to cause vast amounts of methane to blurt out from shall-water gas hydrates or set the biosphere in fire? Two craters whose age approximates that of the P-E boundary are known, one in Texas the other in Jordan, with diameters of 12 and 5 km respectively; far too small to have had any global effect. So either a suitably substantial crater of the right age is hidden somewhere by younger sediments or the association is coincidental – the impact that created the Texan crater could conceivably have flung glassy ejecta to the area of the three seafloor drilling sites.

Almost coinciding with the spherule-based paper’s publication another stole its potential thunder. Researchers at Southampton University used a mathematical model to investigate how a methane release event might have unfolded (Minshull, T.A. et al. 2016. Mechanistic insights into a hydrate contribution to the Paleocene-Eocene carbon cycle perturbation from coupled thermohydraulic simulations. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 43, p. 8637-8644, DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069676). Their findings challenge the hypothesized role of methane hydrates in causing the sudden warming at the P-E boundary. But that leaves out the biosphere burning, which probably would have neded a truly spectacular impact.

More on mechanisms for ancient climate change

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The nearest Earth-like planet

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What could be more exciting for exobiologists and planetary scientists than to discover that a nearby star is orbited by a planet approximately the same mass as the Earth that may support liquid water: a world in the ‘Goldilocks zone’? It seems that Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s closest companion star (4.2 light years distant), might have such a planet (Anglada-Escudé, G. And 30 others 2016. A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri. Nature, v. 536, p. 437-440).  It is one of 34 candidates found to date with various levels of likelihood for having the potential to produce life and support it. To fit the bill a planet first has to orbit a star at a distance where the stellar energy output is unlikely to vapourise any surface water yet is sufficient to keep it at a temperature above freezing point, i.e. the ‘Goldilocks’ or circumstellar habitable zone is closer to a cool star than to a hot one. Note that the liquid-water criterion requires that the planet also has an atmosphere with sufficient pressure to maintain liquid water. It also needs to have a mass close to that of the Earth (between 0.1 to 5 Earth masses) and a similar density, i.e. a candidate needs to be dominated by silicates so that it has a solid surface rather than being made mainly of gases and liquids.

The location of Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxim...
The location of Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxima Centauri and the Sun in the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. (credit: Wikipedia)

Proxima Centauri b, as the planet is called, was not discovered by the Kepler space telescope using the transit method (drops in a star’s brightness as a planet transits across its disk) but by terrestrial telescopes that measure the Doppler shifts in starlight as it wobbles because of the gravitational affect of an orbiting planet. As well as being close, Proxima Centauri is much smaller than the Sun so such effects are more pronounced, especially by planets orbiting close to it. The planet that has excited great interest has an orbital period of only 11.2 Earth days so is much closer to its star and may have a surface temperature (without any greenhouse effect) of 234 K (21 degrees less than that of Earth). The wobble suggests a mass and radius are likely to be 1.3  and between 0.8 to 1.4 times those of Earth, respectively. So Proxima Centauri b is probably a silicate-rich world. But, of course, such limited information gives no guarantee whatever of the presence of liquid water and an atmosphere that can support it. Neither is it possible to suggest a day length. In fact, such a close orbit may have resulted in the planet tidally locked in synchrony with its orbit, in the manner of the Moon showing only one face to the Earth. Moreover, its star is a red dwarf and is known to produce a prodigious X-ray flux, frequent flares and probably a stream of energetic particles, from which only a planet with a magnetic field is shielded. All red dwarfs seem to have such characteristics, and the list of possible Earth-like planets show them to be the most common hosts.

It is too early to get overexcited as technologies for astronomical detection of atmospheres and surface composition are about a decade off at the earliest. Being so close makes it tempting for some space agency to plan sending tiny probes (around 1 gram) using a laser propulsion system that is under development. Anything as substantial as existing planetary probes and certainly a crewed mission is unthinkable with current propulsion systems – a one-way trip of 80 thousand years and stupendous amounts of fuel.

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Oceans of magma, Moon formation and Earth’s ‘Year Zero’

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That the Moon formed and Earth’s geochemistry was reset by our planet’s collision with another, now vanished world, has become pretty much part of the geoscientific canon. It was but one of some unimaginably catastrophic events that possibly characterised the early Solar System and those around other stars. Since the mantle geochemistry of the Earth’s precursor was fundamentally transformed to that which underpinned all later geological events, notwithstanding the formation of the protoEarth about 4.57 Ga ago, I now think of the Moon-forming event as our homeworld’s ‘Year Zero’. It was the ‘beginning’ of which James Hutton reckoned there was ‘no vestige’. Any modern geochemist might comment, ‘Well, there must be some kind of signature!’, but what that might be and when it happened are elusive, to say the least. One way of looking for answers is, as with so many thorny issues these days, to make a mathematical model. James Connelly and Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have designed one based on the fact that one of the volatile elements that must have been partially ‘blown off’ by such a collision is lead and, of course, that is an element with several isotopes that are daughters of long-term decay of radioactive uranium and thorium (Connelly, J.N. & Bizzarro, M. 2016. Lead isotope evidence for a young formation age of the Earth–Moon system. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 452, p. 36-43. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2016.07.010).

Artist’s impression of the impact of a roughly Mars-size planet with the proto-Earth to form an incandescent cloud, from part of which the Moon formed.
Artist’s impression of the impact of a roughly Mars-size planet with the proto-Earth to form an incandescent cloud, from part of which the Moon formed. A NASA animation of lunar history can be viewed here.

Loss of volatile daughter isotopes of Pb produced by the decay schemes of highly refractory isotopes of U and Th would have reset the U-Pb and Th-Pb isotopic systems and therefore the radiogenic ‘clocks’ that depend on them in the same way as melting or high-temperature metamorphism resets the simpler 87Rb-87Sr decay scheme. Each radioactive U isotope has a different decay rate that produces a different Pb isotope daughter (235U Þ 207Pb; 238U Þ 206Pb, so it is possible to devise means of using present-day values of ratios between Pb isotopes, such as 207Pb/206Pb, 206Pb/204Pb and 207Pb/204Pb, to work back to such a ‘closure’ time. In short, that is the approach used by Connelly and Bizzarro. The most complicated bit of that geochemical ruse is estimating values of the ratios for the Earth’s modern mantle and for the Solar system in general – a procedure based on what we can actually measure: lots of mantle-derived basalts and lots of meteorites. Cutting out some important caveats, the result of their model is quite a surprise: ‘Year Zero’ on their account was between 4426 and 4417 Ma years ago, which is astonishingly precise. And it is pretty close to the measured age of the of lunar Highland anorthosites – products of fractional crystallisation of the Moon’s early magma ocean – and also to that of the oldest zircons on Earth. But is also about 60 Ma later than previous estimates

The Connelly and Bizzarro paper follows hard on the heels of another with much the same objective  (Snape, J.F. and 8 others 2016. Lunar basalt chronology, mantle differentiation and implications for  determining the age of the Moon. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 451, p. 149-158. doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016.07.026). Once again omitting a great deal of argument, Snape and colleagues end up with an age for the isotopic resetting of the lunar mantle of 4376 Ma to the nearest 18 Ma; i.e. an age significantly different from that arrived at by Connelly and Bizzarro. So the answer to the question, ‘When was there a vestige of a beginning?’ is, ‘It depends on the model’… Thankfully, neither estimate for ‘Year Zero’ has much bearing on the big, practical questions, such as, ‘When did life form?’, ‘Has there always been plate tectonics?’

More on the origin of the early Solar System and formation of the Earth-Moon system

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Tungsten isotopes provide a ‘vestige of a beginning’

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Apart from ancient detrital zircons no dated materials from the Earth’s crust come anywhere near the age when our home world formed, which incidentally was derived by indirect means. Hutton’s famous saying towards the close of the 18th century, ‘The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end’ seems irrefutable. Hardly surprising, you might think, considering the frantic pace of events that have reworked the geological record for four billion years and convincing evidence that not long after accretion the Moon-forming collision may have melted most of the early mantle. But there is a way of peering beyond even that definitive catastrophe. The metal tungsten, as anyone from the steel town of Rotherham will tell you, alloys very nicely with iron and makes it harder, stronger and more temperature resistant. Most of the Earth’s original complement of tungsten probably ended up in the core; it is a siderophile element. But traces can be detected in virtually any rock and, of course, in W-rich ore bodies. Its interest to modern-day geochemists lies in its naturally occurring isotopes, particularly 182W, a proportion of which forms by decay of a radioactive isotope of hafnium (182Hf). Or rather it did, for 182Hf has a half-life of about 9 million years. Only a vanishingly small amount from a nearby supernova that may have triggered  formation of the solar system remains undecayed.

Artistic impression of the early Earth before Moon formation. (Source: Creative Commons)
Artistic impression of the early Earth before Moon formation. (Source: Creative Commons)

A sign of the former presence of 182Hf in the early Earth comes from higher amounts of its daughter isotope 182W in some Archaean rocks (3.96 Ga) than in younger rocks. That excess is probably from undecayed  182Hf  in asteroidal masses that bombarded the Earth between 4.1 and 3.8 Ga. Now it turns out that some much younger flood basalts from the Ontong Java Plateau on the floor of the West Pacific Ocean (~120 Ma) and Baffin Island in northern Canada (~60 Ma) also contain anomalously high 182W/184W ratios (Rizo, H. et al. 2016. Preservation of Earth-forming events in the tungsten isotopic composition of modern flood basalts. Science, v. 352, p. 809-812; see also: Dahl, T.W. 2016. Identifying remnants of early Earth. Science, v. 352, p. 768-769). A different explanation is required for these occurrences. The flood basalts must have melted from chemically anomalous mantle, which originally contained undecayed 182Hf. The researchers have worked out that this heterogeneity stems from a silicate-rich planetesimal that had formed in the first 50 Ma of the solar system’s history, and was accreted to the Earth before the Moon-forming event – lunar rocks formed after 182Hf became extinct. That catastrophe and the succeeding 4.51 Ga of mantle convection failed to mix the ancient anomaly with the rest of the Earth.

New ideas on evolution of the Solar System

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The Kepler Space Telescope launched in 2009 was designed to detect and measure planetary bodies orbiting other stars. It was hoped that it would help slake the growing thirst for signs of alien but Earth-like worlds, extraterrestrial life and communications from other sentient beings. Results from the Kepler mission have, however, fostered a growing awareness that all is not well with the simple, Laplacian formation of planetary systems. For a start not one of the thousands of exoplanets revealed by Kepler is in a planetary system resembling the Solar System, let along sharing crucial attributes with the Earth. Giant planets occur around only a tenth of the stars observed, and even fewer in stable, near-circular orbits. Although it is early days in the quest for Earth- and Solar System look-alikes, some unexpected contrasts with the Solar System are emerging. For instance, many of the systems have far more mass in close orbit around their star, including gas giants with orbital periods of only a few days and giant rocky planets. Such configurations defy the accepted model for the Solar System where an outward increase in the proportion of volatiles and ices was thought to be the universal rule. Could these ‘hot Jupiters’ have formed further out and then somehow been dragged into scorching proximity to their star? Answers to this and other questions have been sought from computer simulations of the evolution of nebulas. Inevitably, the software has been applied to that of the Solar System, and the results are, quite literally, turning ideas about its early development inside out (Batygin, K., Laughlin, G. & Morbidelli, A., 2016. Born of chaos. Scientific American, v. 314(May 2016),  p. 20-29).

An artist's impression of a protoplanetary disk
An artist’s impression of a protoplanetary disk (credit: Wikipedia)

It seems that at some stage in its growth from the protoplanetary disk the gravitational influence of a planet creates mass perturbations in the remainder of the disk. These feed back to the planet itself, to others and different parts of the disk to create complex and continuously evolving motions; individual planets may migrate inwards, outwards or escape their star’s influence altogether in a chaotic, unpredictable dance. Ultimately, some balance emerges, although that may involve the star engulfing entire worlds and other bodies ending up in interstellar space. It may also end up with worlds dominated by ‘refractory’ materials – i.e. rocky planets like Earth – orbiting further from their star than those composed of ‘volatiles’. In the case of the early Solar System the modelling revealed  Jupiter and Saturn drifting inwards and dragging planetesimals, dust, ice and gas with them to create a gap in the protoplanetary disk. Within about half a million years the two giant planets became locked in their present orbital resonance, which changed the distribution of angular momentum between them and reversed their motion to outward. The clearing of mass neatly explains the asteroid belt and Mars’s otherwise inexplicably small size.

One of the characteristics emerging from Kepler’s discoveries is that ‘super Earths’ orbit close to their star in other systems. Had they existed in the early Solar System the inward drive of Jupiter and Saturn and their ‘bow wave’ of smaller bodies would have had consequences. Swarms of matter from the ‘bow wave’ captured and dissipated angular momentum from the super Earths and dissipated it within a few hundred thousand years, thereby pushing them into death spirals to be consumed by the Sun. This explains what by comparison with Kepler data is a mass deficit in the inner Solar System. The rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – accreted from the leftovers, perhaps over far longer periods than previously thought.

Intense bombardment of the Moon and the Earth took place during the first half billion years after they had formed, rising to a crescendo in its later stages. Formation of the mare basins brought it to a sudden close at 3.8 Ga, which coincides with the earliest evidence for life on Earth. Lunar evidence indicates that this Late Heavy Bombardment spanned 4.1 to 3.8 Ga. Previously explained by a variety of unsatisfying hypotheses it forms part of the new grand modelling of jostling among the giant planets. Once Jupiter and Saturn together with Uranus and Neptune had stabilised, temporarily, they accumulated lesser orbital perturbations from an outlying disk of evolving dust and planetesimals throughout the Hadean Eon. Ultimately, around 4.1 Ga, the giant planets shifted out of resonance, pushing Jupiter slightly inwards to its current orbit and thrusting the other 3 further outwards. Incidentally, this may have flung another giant planet out of solar orbit to the void. Over about 300 million years they restabilised their orbits through gravitational interaction with the Kuiper belt but at the expense of destabilising the icy bodies within it. Some fled inwards as a barrage of impactors, possibly to deliver much of the water in Earth’s oceans. By 3.8 Ga the giants had settled into their modern orbital set-up; hopefully for the last time.

Most exotic geology on far-off Pluto

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About 9 months ago NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the binary dwarf planets Pluto and Charon more than 9 years after launch. Everyone knew they would be frigid little worlds but the great risk was that they might turn out to be geologically boring. The relief when the first images finally arrived – New Horizons’ telecoms are pretty slow – was obvious on the faces at mission control. Even non-Trekkies, such as me, will be thrilled by the first in-depth, illustrated account (Moore, J.M. and 41 others 2016. The geology of Pluto and Charon through the eyes of New Horizons. Science, v. 351, p. 1284-1293), part of a five-article summary of early findings; the other 4 are on-line and scheduled for full publication later (summaries in Science, 18 March 2016, v. 351, p. 1280-1284). A gallery of images can be seen here and an abbreviated summary of the series here.

Pluto imaged in approximately natural colour by New Horizons. (credit: NASA)
Pluto imaged in approximately natural colour by New Horizons. (credit: NASA)

They are astonishing places, even at a resolution of only about 1 km (270 m for some parts), and only one fully illuminated hemisphere was imaged for each because of the short duration of the fly-by. Pluto is by no means locked in stasis, for one of its largest features, Sputnik Planum, is so lightly cratered that is must be barely 10 Ma old at most. It is a pale, heart-shaped terrane dominated by smooth plains, which have a tiled or cellular appearance, with flanking mountains up to 9 km high that appear to be a broken-up chaos. Much of it is made of frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. The dominant nitrogen ice has low strength which accounts for the large area of very low relief. The highly angular mountains are water ice that is buoyant and stronger relative to the others making up Sputnik Planum. Across the plain are areas of pitting and blades that seem to have formed by ice sublimation (solid to gas phase transitions) much like terrestrial snow or ice fields that have begun to degrade, and there are even signs of glacier-like flow.

4 Ga old cratered, upland terranes surrounding Sputnik Planum display grooved, ‘washboard’ and a variety of other surface textures reminiscent of dissection. The may have formed by long-term lateral flow (advection) of nitrogen ice and perhaps some melting. It is in this rugged part of Pluto that colour variation is spectacular, with yellows, blues and reds, probably due to deposition of hydrocarbon ‘frosts’ condensed from the atmosphere. That Pluto is still thermally active is shown by a few broad domes with central depressions that suggest volcanism, albeit with a magma made of ices. Areas of aligned ridges and troughs provide signs of tectonics, possibly extensional in nature.

Charon imaged in approximately natural colour by New Horizons. (credit: NASA)
Charon imaged in approximately natural colour by New Horizons. (credit: NASA)

Charon  shows little sign of remaining active and capable of remoulding its surface. The hemisphere that has been imaged is spectacularly bisected by a 200 km wide belt of roughly parallel escarpments, ridges and troughs with a relief of about 10 km. Superimposed by large craters the extensional system probably dates back to the early history of the outer Solar System. Dominated by water ice it seems that Charon’s surface may have lost any more volatile ices by sublimation and loss to space. This suggests that superficial differences between two small worlds of similar density may be explained by Charon’s lower mass and gravitational field, resulting in the loss of its most volatile components that partly veneer the surface of Pluto.

Being hugely distant from any other sizeable body it is likely that the energy used to form cryovolcanic eruptions and deform the surface of both dwarf planets is due to internal radioactivity. Their similar mean density around 1.9 implies rocky cores that could host the required unstable isotopes. Being the only Kuiper Belt objects that have been closely examined naturally suggests that the rest of the myriad bodies that clutter it are similar. There are currently as many as 9 other sizable bodies suspected of eccentrically orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper Belt, including one that may be ten times more massive than Earth – a candidate for a ninth planet to replace Pluto, which was removed from that status following redefinition in 2006 of what constitutes a bona fide planet.

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Fascinating glacial feature found on Mars

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Many of the vast wastes of northern Canada and Scandinavia that were ground to a paste by ice sheets during the last glacial cycle show peculiar features that buck the general glacial striation of the Shield rocks. They are round-topped ridges that wind apparently aimlessly across the tundra. In what is now a gigantic morass, the ridges form well-drained migration routes for caribou and became favourite hunting spots for the native hunter gatherers: in Canada they are dotted with crude simulations of the human form, or inugoks, that the Innuit erected to corral game to killing grounds. Where eroded they prove to be made of sand and gravel, which has proved an economic resource in some areas lacking in building aggregate, good but small examples being found in the Scottish Midland Valley that have served development of Glasgow and Edinburgh. They were given the Gaelic name eiscir meaning ‘ridge of gravel’ (now esker) from a few examples in Ireland.

Eskers form from glacial meltwater that makes its way from surface chasms known as moulins to the very bottom of an ice sheet where water flows much in the manner of a river, except in tubes rather than channels. Where the ice base is more or less flat the tubes meander as do normal sluggish rivers, and like them the tubes deposit a proportion of the abundant sediment derived by melting glacial ice. Once the ice sheet melts and ablates away, the sediments lose the support of the tube walls and flop down to form the eponymous low ridges: the reverse of the sediment filled channels of streams that have either dried up or migrated. Eskers are one of the features that shout ‘glacial action’ with little room for prevarication.

The classic form of eskers in the Phlegra Montes of Mars. (credit: Figure 6 in Gallagher and Balme, 2015)
The classic form of eskers in the Phlegra Montes of Mars. (credit: Figure 6 in Gallagher and Balme, 2015)

Glacial terrains on Mars have been proposed for some odd looking surfaces, but other processes such as debris flows are equally attractive. To the astonishment of many, Martian eskers have now been spotted during systematic interpretation of the monumental archives of high-resolution orbital images of the planetary surface (Gallagher, C. & Balme, M. 2015. Eskers in a complete, wet-based glacial system in the Phlegra Montes region, Mars. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 431, p. 96-109). The discovery is in a suspected glacial terrain that exhibits signs of something viscous having flowed on low ground around higher topographic features, bombardment stratigraphy suggests a remarkable young age for the terrain or about 150 Ma ago: the Amazonian. Ice and its effects are not too strange to suggest for Mars which today is pretty much frigid, except for a few suggestions of active flow of small watery streams. Eskers demand meltwater in abundance, and Gallagher and Balme attribute some of the other features in the Phlegra Montes to wet conditions. However, the eskers are a one-off, so far as they know. Consequently, rather than appealing to some climatic warm up to explain the evidence for wetness, they suggest that the flowing water tubes resulted from melting deep in the ice as a result of locally high heat flow through the Martian crust, which is a lot more plausible.

Deccan Trap sprung by bolide?

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English: Alvarez and K-T Boundary
Luis and Walter Alvarez at the end-Mesozoic Boundary (credit: Wikipedia)

It was 35 years back that father and son team Luis and Walter Alvarez upset a great many geoscientists by suggesting that a very thin layer of iridium-rich mud that contained glass spherules and shocked mineral grains was evidence for a large meteorite having struck Earth. They especially annoyed palaeontologists because of their claim that it occurred at the very top of the youngest Cretaceous and that the mud was spread far and wide in deep- and shallow-marine stratigraphic sequences and also in those of continental rocks. It marked the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras and, of course, the demise of the dinosaurs and a great many more, less ‘sexy’ beasts. Luis was a physicist, his son a proper geologist and their co-researchers were chemists. It can hardly be said that they stole anyone’s thunder since the issue of mass extinctions was quiescent, yet their discovery ranks with that of Alfred Wegener; another interloper into the closed-shop geoscientific community. They got the same cold-shoulder treatment, but massive popular acclaim as well, even from a minority of geologists who welcomed their having shaken up their colleagues, 15 years after the last ‘big thing’: plate tectonics. And then the actual site of the impact was found by geophysicists in a sedimentary basin in the Gulf of Mexico off the small town of Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula.

Chicxulub impact - artist impression
Chicxulub impact – artist impression (credit: Wikipedia)

As they say, ‘the rest is history’ and a great many geoscientists didn’t just jump but pounced on this potential bandwagon. Central to this activity was the fact that, within error, the ages of the impact, the mass extinction and a vast pile of continental lavas in western India, the Deccan Traps, were more or less the same (around 66 Ma). Flood basalt events are just about as dramatic as mega-impacts because of their sheer scale, of the order of a million cubic kilometres; that they were exuded in a mere million years or so, but in only a few tens of stupendous lava flows; and they are far beyond the direct experience of humans, blurting out only every 30 Ma or so. This periodicity roughly tallies with mass extinctions, great and small, through the Mesozoic. There have been two large bands of enthusiasts engaged in the causality of the end-Mesozoic die-off – the extraterrestrials and the parochialists who favoured a more mundane, albeit cataclysmic snuffing-out. Mass extinctions in general have been repeatedly examined, and in recent years it has become clear that most of those since 250 Ma ago seem to be associated with basalt-flood events and are purely terrestrial in origin. As regards the event that ended the Mesozoic, it has proved difficult to resolve whether to point the finger at the Deccan Traps or the Chicxulub impact. Both might have severely damaged the biosphere in perhaps different ways, so a ‘double whammy’ has become a compromise solution.

The Western Ghat hills at Matheran in Maharash...
Deccan flood basalts forming the Western Ghats in Maharashtra, India (credit: Wikipedia)

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort from different quarters has gone into charting the progress of the Deccan volcanism. Some dating seemed at one stage to place the bulk of the volcanism significantly before the mass extinction and impact, others had them spot on and there were even signs of an hiatus in eruptions at the critical juncture. The problem was geochronological precision of the argon-argon method of radiometric dating that is most used for rocks of basaltic composition: many labs cannot do better than an uncertainty of 1%, which is ±0.7 Ma for ages around the end of the Mesozoic, not far short of the entire duration of these huge events. Some Deccan samples have now been dated to a standard of ±0.1 Ma by the Ar-Ar lab at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California-Berkeley (Renne, P.R. et al. 2010. State shift in Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, possibly induced by impact. Science, v. 350, p. 76-78). The results, between 65.5 to 66.5 Ma, nicely bracket the K/T (now K/Pg) boundary age of 66.04±0.04 Ma. It looks like the double whammy compromise is the hypothesis of choice. But there is more to mere dating.

Renne and colleagues plot the ages against their position in the volcanic stratigraphy of the Deccan Traps in two ways: against the estimated height from base in the pile and against the estimated volume of the erupted materials as it built up – the extent and thickness of successive flows varies quite a lot. The second plot provided a surprise. After the K/Pg event the mean rate of effusion – the limited number of individual flows capped by well-developed soils shows that the build-up was episodic – doubled from 0.4±0.2 to 0.9±0.3 km3 yr-1. Despite the much larger uncertainty in the extent and volume of individual lava Formations than that of their ages, this is clearly significant. Does it imply that the Chicxulub impact somehow affected the magma production from, the mantle plume beneath the Deccan? It had been suggested early in the debate that the antipodean position of the lava field relative to that of Chicxulub may indicate that the huge seismicity from the impact triggered the Deccan magma production. Few accepted that possibility when it first appeared. However, Renne and co. do think it deserves another look, at least at the possibility of some linked effect on the magmatism. Perhaps the magma chamber was somehow enlarged by increased global seismicity; other chambers could have been added; magma might have been ‘pumped’ out more efficiently, or a combination of such effects. The ‘plumbing’ of flood basalt piles is generally hidden, but huge dyke swarms in Precambrian times have been suggested as feeders to long-eroded flood basalts. Seismicity of the scale produced by asteroid impacts can do a lot of damage. The Chicxulub impactor at around 10 km diameter would have carried energy a million times greater than that of the largest thermonuclear bomb, equivalent to an earthquake of Magnitude 12.4 that would have been a thousand times more powerful than the largest recorded earthquake with tectonic causes. Extensional faulting sourced in this fashion in the Deccan area may have increased the pathways along which magma might blurt out.

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Duncan, R. 2015. Deadly combination. Nature, v. 527, p. 172-173.