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Earth's Core Is Leaking All Sorts of Materials That Have Been Trapped Since Our Planet's Birth


Our early Earth was a heavy metal album cover: a molten ball covered in a global lava ocean, spewing lethal gases while being pelted by the flaming space-rocks of our Solar System's violently chaotic afterbirth.   Over the next 4.5 billion years of hectic cosmo-geological time, it has settled down a bit, allowing humans, lemurs, and others to emerge.  A vision of this hellish ancient reality remains, (hopefully) never to be glimpsed by human eyes: our molten metallic core, blazing about as hotly as the surface of the Sun.  But our core constantly sends chemical messengers up through its layers, including the space-borne ingredients of its birth, locked away for about one-third the lifetime of the Universe.  This includes the hydrogen that was drawn in from the giant cloud of gas and dust that formed the Sun, which continues to ooze up from the core and turns into water in the mantle and crust – not a splashy-sloshy water, but a water trapped in minerals.

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