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Water and partial melting of Earth’s mantle

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Abstract

Water plays a crucial role in the melting of Earth’s mantle. Mantle magmatisms mostly occur at plate boundaries (including subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges) and in some intraplate regions with thermal anomaly. At oceanic subduction zones, water released by the subducted slab may induce melting of the overlying mantle wedge or even the slab itself, giving rise to arc magmatism, or may evolve into a supercritical fluid. The physicochemical conditions for the formation of slab melt and supercritical fluid are still under debate. At mid-ocean ridges and intraplate hot zones, water and CO2 cause melting of the upwelling mantle to occur at greater depths and in greater extents. Low degree melting of the mantle may occur at boundaries between Earth’s internal spheres, including the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB), the upper mantletransition zone boundary, and the transition zone-lower mantle boundary, usually attributed to contrasting water storage capacity across the boundary. The origin for the stimulating effect of water on melting lies in that water as an incompatible component has a strong tendency to be enriched in the melt (i.e., with a mineral-melt partition coefficient much smaller than unity), thereby lowering the Gibbs free energy of the melt. The partitioning of water between melt and mantle minerals such as olivine, pyroxenes and garnet has been investigated extensively, but the effects of hydration on the density and transport properties of silicate melts require further assessments by experimental and computational approaches.

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  1. Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Crust-Mantle Materials and Environments, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    HuaiWei Ni, Li Zhang & Xuan Guo

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Ni, H., Zhang, L. & Guo, X. Water and partial melting of Earth’s mantle. Sci. China Earth Sci. 59, 720–730 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-015-5254-8

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