Aug 12, 2010 10:09 GMT  ·  By

Experts recently discovered what may very well be a remnant of a primitive Earth mantle. The reservoir was identified in the Canadian Arctic, on the Baffin Island.

The team that made the finding was led by geologist Matthew Jackson, who is based at the Boston University.

Details of the discovery were published this week in the latest issue of the top-rated scientific journal Nature.

The researchers explain that the mantle is the layer connecting our planet's crust to its outer core, and add that the structure makes up for about 84 percent of the Earth's volume.

A common misconception about this layer is that it is uniform. Nothing could be further from the truth, geologists say.

They explain that the structure contains numerous individual portions, as well as many reservoirs, all of which have their own chemical properties and compositions.

Generally, geologists consider Earth to be a chondritic object. This means that its composition should be similar to that of some of the oldest rocks in the solar system.

For many years, experts believed that Earth and the other rocky planets fitted into this model, but the new data seems to argue against this idea.

“We had been looking under the wrong rock,” Jackson says. He explains that previous theories imply the existence of a certain isotope ration in the mantle, a ratio that simply does not exist.

Jackson now proposes a new model for how the early Earth mantle looked like. “The early Earth went through a differentiation event and the Earth's crust was extracted from the early mantle,” he says.

“[It] is now hidden in the deep Earth; the hidden crust and the mantle found on Baffin Island would sum to chondritic,” he adds.

Funding for the new investigation came from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The work revolved around analyzing the ratio of hydrogen to neodymium isotopes in the magma making up the planet's mantle.

Neodymium is a so-called rare-Earth magnet, which is currently used for producing high-quality speakers and magnets.

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