“Journey to the center of the Earth”: a mineral physicist’s revisit

Since the fictional journey by Jules Verne in 1864, more than 100,000 non-fictional articles have been published to follow the journey to the center of the Earth. Instead of deciphering the Runic manuscript to set the passage for the journey, seismologists have constructed their own maps of the Earth’s interior, on which geochemists color resident minerals. While the team of professor Liedenbrock embarked their epic journey through a volcano in Iceland, modern mineral physicists subject minerals to the conditions expected in the Earth’s interior and observe the deep world in situ. While it is unclear whether the protagonists in the novel could complete their journey to the very center of the Earth, the scientific journey deep into our planet still awaits much more to be discovered.

In this talk, I will showcase what has been added through our own scientific journey to the Earth’s interior. We set water, one of the most important volatile species on the Earth’s surface, as the supporting actor in our journey. We used diamond anvil cells to let the water meet minerals under the conditions expected deep inside the Earth and irradiated X-rays to watch their interactions. As the fictional team found a subterranean river during their journey, we observed how much more water can be added into mineral carriers during subduction processes [1,2], how deep water can be delivered by transferring the carriers [3], and what would happen when water reaches the destination at the core-mantle boundary, as depicted in the novel by lightening clouds over the subterranean ocean [4]. Deep in time, natural force could have created conditions for life by the action of heat and moisture. By simulating the reactions in the early magma ocean by the brightest X-ray pulses, we observed how water could have nurtured the conditions required for the origin of life on Earth [5].

 

References

[1] Hwang, et. al., Nature Geoscience, 10 (2017), 947-953

[2] Bang, et. al., Nature Communications, 16 (2025), 2279

[3] Bang, et. al., Nature Communications, 15 (2024), 4428

[4] Kim, et. al., Nature Geoscience, 16 (2023) 1208-1214.

[5] Choi, et. al., Science Advances, 9 (2023), eadi6096