[Rockhounds] Shocked meteorites provide clues to Earth's lower mantle

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Deep below the Earth's surface lies a thick rocky layer called the mantle,
which makes up the majority of our planet's volume. While Earth's mantle is
too deep for humans to observe directly, certain meteorites can provide
clues to this unreachable layer.

In a study recently published in *Science Advances*, an international team
of scientists, including Sang-Heon Dan Shim and Thomas Sharp of Arizona
State University (ASU), have completed a complex analysis of a "shocked
meteorite <https://phys.org/tags/meteorite/>" (one that has experienced
high-pressure and high-temperature conditions through impact events) and
gained new insight into Earth's lower mantle <https://phys.org/tags/mantle/>
.

Shocked meteorites have provided many examples of deep mantle minerals
since 1969 when high-pressure mineral Ringwoodite was discovered.

For this study, lead author Luca Bindi of the University of Florence
(Italy), Shim and Sharp of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and
Xiande Xie of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (China), focused
their efforts on a sample of a shocked meteorite called Suizhou.

"Suizhou was an ideal meteorite for our team to analyze," explains Shim,
who specializes in using high-pressure experiments to study Earth's mantle.
"It provided our team with samples of natural high-pressure minerals like
those believed to make up the Earth's deep mantle."

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-meteorites-clues-earth-mantle.html