Scientists find water was fueling volcanoes 3 billion years ago

Ancient rocks from Western Australia suggest water was reaching deep inside Earth more than three billion years ago, long before modern plate tectonics may have fully developed. Researchers propose that water-rich pieces of crust periodically sank into the mantle through a process they call “dripduction.” The buried water then helped produce magma and volcanic eruptions. Scientists find water was fueling volcanoes 3 billion years ago.

The international team, led by Adelaide University geochemist Dr. Eric Vandenburg, examined ancient rocks from Western Australia’s Pilbara Craton. Their analysis suggests that water had traveled far beneath the surface before contributing to the formation of magma that fed volcanoes resembling those found around the Pacific "Ring of Fire" today.

Published in Nature Communications, the findings indicate that Earth may have been recycling water between its surface and interior much earlier than scientists had realized, even though the young planet operated very differently from the world we know now. Vandenburg, from the School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, said the ancient rocks offer an unusual opportunity to investigate conditions on Earth billions of years ago. "These rocks formed more than three billion years ago, when Earth was a very different place," he said.