Team Lead: Dasgupta;
Members: Hassanzadeh, Schlichting, Stewart, Marty, Monteleone
Origin and delivery of life-essential ingredients to rocky planets are necessary steps but not sufficient for habitability. Chemical habitability of surface environments requires sustainable supply of the essential ingredients to surface environment from planetary mantles through volcanism. Because solid silicate mantle in a differentiated planet forms via large scale melting and core formation in the first tens to hundred million years of the planet’s history every element being delivered prior to this early differentiation has the potential to get fractionated.
Thus, it is critical to consider how the life-essential elements may get distributed among the major reservoirs of various planetary systems.
This research will aim to answer the following questions:
Can magma ocean processing redistribute the ingredients (between the core and the magma ocean, and magma ocean and atmosphere) such that appreciable volatile species can be retained in the mantle?
Are there certain styles of early differentiation that are more favorable than others in retaining life-essential elements at the outer layers of rocky bodies?
We will outline magma ocean processing conditions that lead to the key ingredients at the silicate fraction of the planets. As part of this theme, we will also study thermo-chemical coevolution of MO and overlying atmosphere using numerical models to constrain the distribution of major volatiles at the end of magma ocean stage.