Investigating Potential Causes for An Abrupt Change of Thermal State in Earth’s Upper Mantle During the Great Oxygenation Event

The oxygenic photosynthesis might have well evolved about 3 billion years ago, but there seems no great increase of atmospheric oxygen until the great oxygenation event (GOE) at about 2.4 Ga. One possibility for the suppressing of atmospheric oxygen level before the GOE is through consumption of oxygen by reduced volcanic gasses. The amount of atmospheric oxygen that could be consumed by volcanic gases depends on the absolute amount of volcanic gases as well as the redox state of the upper mantle. Evidence from the redox sensitive V/Sc ratio have shown that the redox state of the upper mantle have remained constant for the last 3.5 billion years (e.g., Li and Lee, 2004). If so, abrupt changes in thermal state of Earth’s upper mantle could explain the rapid changes of degassing rate at the time of GOE.

The Earth’s lowermost mantle has been shown to be compositionally heterogeneous, which could be caused by the presence of dense, primordial material resulting from early differentiation processes. An important question is how do chemical heterogeneities in the lowermost mantle influence the secular cooling of the upper mantle. Here, we performed numerical calculations to explore the effects of themochemical convection on the thermal evolution of Earth’s upper mantle. A large parameter space is explored, with varying Rayleigh number, viscosity, internal heating and density of chemical heterogeneities. We start with an initially hot mantle with a layer of dense material in the lowermost mantle. We found that when the mantle is hot, the dense material remains layered and covers the entire CMB, leading to low CMB heat flux. In this stage, the upper mantle cools down rapidly. However, as the mantle cools, the dense material is swept into discrete thermochemical piles by cold downwellings, leading to increasing CMB heat flux. The cooling rate of the mantle is temporarily reduced as this transition occurs. This occurs at a time consistent with the GOE event.

Li, Z. X. A. and C. T. A. Lee (2004). "The constancy of upper mantle fO(2) through time inferred from V/Sc ratios in basalts." Earth and Planetary Science Letters 228(3-4): 483-493.