Collaborative Research: Partial Melting of the Shallow Mantle from Thermodynamic Modeling of Mineral and Melts

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The region beneath mid-ocean ridges where the mantle melts will never be sampled directly, so understanding melting in the mantle depends on laboratory experiments at the temperatures and pressures where melting occurs. These experiments, coupled with thermodynamics of mantle minerals, have allowed us to predict the amount of melting, the temperature of melting, and the depth range of melting beneath ocean ridges. The present predictions, however, do not agree with new melting experiments using techniques that produce less than 5% melting. Thus, it appears that a few key experiments and refinements of the thermodynamic models are needed. The proposed work is to conduct the experiments and incorporate new thermodynamic data into existing predictive models.