By: Jackson Liu

In spring 2023, scientists retrieved the first samples from deep in the earth’s mantle. They did this by digging a whopping 1,268 meters below the Atlantic ocean. Researchers are hoping to learn more about early Earth’s evolution and how it affected life on earth.

The mantle is the part of earth that is between the core (middle of the earth) and the crust (top layer of the earth). It is the largest section of the earth and getting to it isn’t easy. You have to find an exposed part of the mantle in the ocean floor, then dig down hundreds to thousands of feet to get samples from deep inside the earth’s mantle. One such place is the Atlantic Massif, a mountain in the atlantic ocean where the mantle is exposed. It is where scientists retrieved the samples, digging down 1,268 meters, which is 1,000 meters deeper than the last deepest hole ever dug.

Scientists say that the rocks from the mantle are more similar to the rocks on early earth than the rocks that form continents today. Professor Johan Lissenberg from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences says “its value is in what the cores of mantle rocks could tell us about the makeup and evolution of our planet.” The chemical makeup in the samples are very different from what scientists expected. There are much less of the mineral pyroxene in the samples, and much more of magnesium, which proves that the rock is more melted than scientists thought.