Rusty Green Precambrian Ocean Yielded Today's Iron Ore Deposits
Though they may seem rock solid, the ancient sedimentary rocks called iron formations – the world’s chief economic source of iron ore – were once dissolved in seawater. How did that iron go from a dissolved state to banded iron formations?
Green rust (l) forming in Dr. Halevy’s lab in conditions similar to those in the Precambrian ocean. (r) Electron microscope images reveal the thin, hexagonal plates typical of green rust
With almost no oxygen, the oceans were iron-rich, but that did not mean that iron remained dissolved in seawater indefinitely: it ultimately formed insoluble compounds with other elements and settled to the seabed to give rise to banded iron formations.
Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science
The idea that one of those insoluble compounds could be a rusty green mineral occurred to him during his doctoral research, says Dr. Halevy, when he was trying to recreate the conditions on early Mars, including its rusty-red iron sediments. “I got some green stuff I didn’t recognize at first, which quickly turned orange when I exposed it to air. With a little more careful experimentation, I found that this was a mineral called green rust, which is extremely rare on Earth today, owing to its affinity for oxygen.” Today, green rust quickly transforms into the familiar red rust, but with not much free oxygen around, Dr. Halevy reasoned, it could have been an important way for dissolved iron to form solid compounds and settle to the sea floor.
Support for these ideas comes from Sulawesi, Indonesia, where green rust forms today in iron-rich, oxygen-poor Lake Matano, thought to be similar to the seawater that existed during extended periods of Earth’s early history. To test his ideas in detail and explore their significance, Dr. Halevy set up experiments in which he and his team recreated, as closely as possible, the conditions of the ancient, oxygen-free, Precambrian ocean. They found that green rust not only forms under these conditions, but that when left to age, it transforms into the minerals found in Precambrian iron formations – a combination of iron-bearing oxides, carbonates, and silicates.
Could green rust have been a main vehicle for settling iron out of seawater? Dr. Halevy and his team developed models to depict the iron cycle in Earth’s early oceans, including the possibility of green rust formation and competition with other mineral shuttles of iron to the seafloor. Their findings suggest that green rust was probably a major player in the iron cycle. The iron in the green rust later transformed into the minerals we can now observe in the geologic record.
Dr. Itay Halevy’s research is supported by the Helen Kimmel Center for Planetary Science; the Deloro Institute for Advanced Research in Space and Optics; and the Wolfson Family Charitable Trust. Dr. Halevy is the incumbent of the Anna and Maurice Boukstein Career Development Chair in Perpetuity.
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/02/rusty-green-precambrian-ocean-yielded.html
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