The researchers discovered the iron minerals, called iron oxyhydroxides, by squishing mineral samples between two tiny diamond anvils while zapping them with a laser.
The new minerals contain as much as 15% water by weight. "If you add up all the H and O atoms in the formula and combine them into H2O, just a five-pound piece of the stuff would contain a pint of liquid water," Jacobsen added. "If this material existed in the early Earth, spread out across the base of the mantle, even just a few percent of it would potentially be enough to supply the formation of the oceans."
A tectonic mystery
Water in the mantle makes the molten rock stretchier, which means the mantle can change its shape and convect. That's a big part of why Earth has plate tectonics — without water in the mantle, the material is too stiff to move around and drag the planet's crust with it. We know there's water in the mantle; however, we don't know exactly what the water in the mantle is doing.
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The mantle's convection could bring these minerals from near the core to close to the surface in large mantle plumes, where the minerals would melt and release their water, thus completing the water cycle in the mantle and contributing to volcanic hotspots at the surface. This process has implications for water cycles and theories of how other rocky planets and exoplanets — especially the weird ones that are mostly molten rock — formed.
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