Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Iron-Loving Metals From Space

Precious metals are surprisingly abundant in the upper parts of the Earth because a huge meteor shower rained them down out of space, scientists have shown.
Meteor shower

The authors of a paper published in Nature analysed different isotopes of tungsten in four billion-year-old rocks taken from Greenland to work out when and how these metals were added to the upper reaches of the Earth.

The findings support the 'terminal bombardment' hypothesis - that the same meteor shower that left the moon scarred with craters also added back rare metals to the upper Earth after the mantle had separated from the core.

Read it all here.


No comments: