ERC Advanced Grant · 2020
Melting the Earth: The role of magma oceans in defining the Earth’s physical and chemical evolution
Catastrophic planetary collisions during the Earth’s first 500 million years provided enough energy to melt its interior, creating planetary-scale volumes of melt, or magma oceans. Their cooling and crystallisation determined the chemistry of the Earth and its long-term habitability. However, we do not know where and how the Earth’s magma oceans crystallised, whether remnants of early magma ocean melts and crystals, or the iron-sulfide liquid that may have separated from them, are still preserved in the mantle today, or what their role is in storing the Earth’s volatiles and rare metals. We also do not know if this residual material remained inert or whether it interacted with mantle…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.