Planetary Scientists Provided New Insights into the Evolution of Earth

Planetary scientists provided new insights into the process behind the evolution of Earth. They  demonstrated how salty water and gases transfer from the atmosphere into our planet’s interior. An international team led by Mark Kendrick at the University of Melbourne showed that atmospheric gases are mixed into the mantle, inside the Earth’s interior, during the process called subduction. During subduction, techtonic plates collide and submerge beneath volcanoes in subduction zones.

This finding is important because it was earlier believed that inert gases inside the Earth had primordial origins and were trapped during the formation of the solar system.       
   
Because the composition of neon in the Earth's mantle is very similar to that in meteorites, it was recently suggested by scientists that most of the Earth's gases were delivered by meteorites during a late meteorite bombardment that also generated visible craters on the Earth's moon.   

   
For their research, the scientists collected serpentinite rocks from mountain belts in Italy and Spain. These rocks originally formed on the seafloor and were partially subducted into the Earth's interior before they were uplifted into their present positions by collision of European and African plates. The findings were published in the latest edition of the 'Nature Geoscience' journal.