Collaborative Research: GLOW Tracing Earths Accretion Using Siderophile Element Genetics

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Our planet formed from bodies that were sourced from various parts of the emerging Solar System. To understand the origin and initial composition of the only known habitable planet, knowledge of when and from where Earth’s building blocks formed in the Solar System is required. This Division of Earth Sciences - Geoscience Lessons for and from Other Worlds (GLOW) award supports a project which aims to broaden and deepen the understanding of what materials made Earth and how they evolved into a habitable planet. The project combines well-established cosmochemical isotopic tracers in meteorites, the debris of planet formation, with terrestrial geochemical tracers to identify the composition of Earth’s building blocks that were added towards the end of the planet’s formation. This period in Earth’s history may have witnessed delivery of a portion of life-seeding materials, making it a prime target for study. The project serves to support and educate graduate and undergraduate students to help meet a growing demand for cross-disciplinary planetary science research projects at the university level. It also coordinates early and mid-career scientists to facilitate integration of methods and interpretations of sample data and numerical impact models to make them relevant and accessible to the broader planetary science community and student body. Understanding the origin and initial composition of the only known habitable planet requires knowledge of when and from where in the Solar System Earth’s building blocks accreted. This project combines the well-established genetic tracer capabilities of siderophile (iron-loving) elements in meteorites with terrestrial geochemical data to constrain the composition of Earth’s building blocks towards the end of its formation. This period in Earth’s history may have witnessed delivery of a portion of the volatile budget (e.g., H, N, C, O, S compounds), making it a prime target for study. To investigate the nature of material added during this stage of accretion, the project will assess how late accretion modified mantle siderophile isotopic compositions. The project will generate a unique and self-consistent siderophile isotopic dataset of mantle-derived materials to constrain the composition of several unstudied terrestrial mantle domains. The genetics of building blocks accreted late in Earth’s history will be advanced by contrasting these and other terrestrial isotopic data with published genetic isotope data in meteorites. Sample-derived isotopic data will be integrated into mixing calculations informed by smoothed particle hydrodynamic impact simulations that predict resultant mantle compositions following late accretion of impactors.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.