What is the chemical composition of the Earth’s interior? Because it is impossible to drill more than about ten kilometres deep into the Earth, volcanic rocks formed by melting Earth’s deep interior often provide such information. Geochemists at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Amsterdam (Netherlands) have investigated the volcanic rocks that build up the Portuguese island group of the Azores. Their goal: gather new information about the compositional evolution of the Earth’s mantle, which is the layer roughly between 30 and 2,900 kilometres deep inside the Earth. Using sophisticated analytical techniques, they discovered that the composition of the mantle below the Azores is different than previously thought—suggesting that large parts of it contain surprisingly few so-called incompatible elements. These are chemical elements which, as a result of the constant melting of the Earth’s mantle, accumulate in the Earth’s crust, which is Earth’s outermost solid layer.
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Source: Phys.org