Scientists have known for quite some time what the majority of the innermost part of the Earth consists of, and that is around 85 percent iron and about 10 percent Nickel, but the remaining 5 percent has always been a bit of a mystery… until now. For years researchers have been fighting to be the first to discover what this missing element could possibly be and now a Japanese research team is confident the final 5 percent is mostly silicon, and their findings were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The Earth’s core has an estimated radius of around 1,200 km and lies about 3,000 km underground. Because it’s so far down, instead of mining the Earth’s core researchers created a miniature Earth model instead, complete with crust, mantle core, and all, right inside the University of Tohoku lab. This gave the team a much better understanding of what they could be dealing with.
Silicon has always been an element of consideration, and so it was here the team further explored. To begin with, they created iron and nickel alloys, mixed them with silicon, pressurized them, and then blasted them to about 6,000 degrees Celsius in order to replicate the conditions of the Earth’s core. In doing this, the team was able to see that silicon was most likely the missing element.
Simon Redfern, professor of mineral physics at the University of Cambridge said, “These difficult experiments are exciting because they can provide a window into what Earth’s interior was like soon after it first formed, 4.5 billion years ago, when the core first started to separate from the rocky parts of Earth.” If scientists can determine exactly what is down in the core, then perhaps that would reveal what conditions helped to form the Earth.
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