Insights into the fate of volatile species during the planetary life cycle from dynamic compression experiments

Volatile elements play an important role in the dynamics and evolution of terrestrial planets. Astronomical and geophysical observations indicate that volatile species can be retained in planetary materials during the violent processes of both planetary creation and destruction. Our work focuses on investigating the role of silicate melts, and their frozen counterpart glasses, in providing an atomistic mechanism for retaining volatiles during the planetary life cycle as both exhibit a variety of anomalous behaviors at high pressures and temperatures. We will present results on the compressibility of silicate melts for sample materials containing water and other volatile species determined experimentally from dynamic compression experiments at Sandia National Laboratories with insights from complementary molecular dynamic calculations. We will present a selection of results for silicate samples with a range of volatile content that have undergone a variety of loading paths including ramp compression to 10-30 GPa using the Thor pulsed-power driver, shock-melt-ramp compression from 100-130 GPa initial shock state to 200+ GPa using the Z Machine, and shock-release from shock states up to 200 GPa using both the STAR two-stage gun and the Z Machine.

* SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.