Explosive volcanic eruption produced rare mineral on Mars




A problem that has confounded the Mars scientific community since NASA's Curiosity rover found the mineral tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016 has been solved by planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA's Johnson Space Center, and the California Institute of Technology.

It wasn't immediately evident how a concentrated piece of tridymite, an exceptionally uncommon high-temperature, low-pressure type of quartz, came up in the crater. Due to the possibility that it formerly housed liquid water, GaleCrater was chosen as Curiosity's landing location. Curiosity discovered evidence that Gale Crater was a lake as recently as 1 billion years ago.

As the co-author of a study that was recently published online in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Kirsten Siebach of Rice University said, "The discovery of tridymite in a mudstone in Gale Crater is one of the most surprising observations that the Curiosity rover has made in 10 years of exploring Mars. On Earth, tridymite is often linked with quartz-forming, explosive, advanced volcanic systems, but on Mars, where most of the volcanoes are quite young, we discovered it at the bottom of an old lake.

As a mission specialist for NASA's Curiosity expedition, Siebach is an assistant professor at Rice's Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. She collaborated with NASA's Elizabeth Rampe, Caltech's Paula Antoshechkina, Valerie Payré and Michael Thorpe, two postdoctoral researchers in her Rice research group, to solve the puzzle. Lead author of the paper Payré is now attending Northern Arizona University and getting ready to start teaching at the University of Iowa in the autumn.

To start, Siebach and colleagues reexamined the data from each and every tridymite discovery that has been recorded on Earth. Additionally, they reexamined sedimentary data from the Gale Crater lake and analyzed volcanic elements from models of Mars volcanism. They then developed a fresh hypothesis that was consistent with all the data: The martian magma underwent a partial cooling process called fractional crystallization that concentrated silicon while it rested for a longer period of time than typical in a cavern under a volcano. The volcano erupted violently, spewing tridymite, a material made of excess silicon, into the Gale Crater lake and the nearby rivers. Water not only helped sort the minerals created by weathering, but it also assisted in the natural chemical weathering processes that helped break down the ash.

Tridymite would have been concentrated in the scenario, resulting in minerals similar to those found in 2016. It might also explain other geochemical hints discovered in the sample by Curiosity, such as opaline silicates and decreased levels of aluminum oxide.

It's simply a simple development of other volcanic materials we discovered in the crater, according to Siebach. "We contend that the volcano most likely erupted at the same time the lake existed since we only observed this mineral once and it was extremely concentrated in a single stratum. Even though the particular sample we looked at wasn't entirely made up of volcanic ash, water had aged and sorted it."

It would suggest that catastrophic volcanism took place more than 3 billion years ago, when Mars was changing from a wetter and maybe warmer world to the arid and desolate planet it is today. If a volcanic explosion similar to the one in the scenario actually took place when Gale Crater housed a lake.

There is a lot of proof that basaltic volcanic eruptions occurred on Mars, but this chemistry is more advanced, she claimed. This research raises the possibility that Mars' volcanic past is more intricate and fascinating than we had previously thought.

The Curiosity rover is still operating, and NASA is getting ready to commemorate the landing's tenth anniversary next month.

NASA (15-MSLPSP15 2-0051, 15-MSLPSP15 0015, and 80NSSC22K0732), the National Science Foundation (1947616), and Rice University's Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences all provided funding for the study.

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