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Potassium-40 isotopic evidence for an extant pre-giant-impact component of Earth’s mantle

Nature Geoscience (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Earth’s bulk composition has elemental and isotopic characteristics that cannot be fully reconciled with a mixture of known primitive meteorite compositions1,2,3. One potential explanation for this is that the proto-Earth accreted materials with isotopic signatures distinct from those accreted after the Moon-forming giant impact. Here we report high-precision mass-independent potassium isotopic measurements from thermal ionization mass spectrometry of terrestrial rocks from various ancient and modern sources in the crust and mantle that we argue are consistent with this explanation. Specifically, we found that some mafic Archaean rocks derived from the Hadean–Eoarchaean mantle (including samples from Isua, Nuvvuagittuq and the Kaapvaal Craton) and certain modern ocean island basalts (from La Réunion Island and Kama’ehuakanaloa volcano, Hawaii) exhibit an average 40K deficit of 65 parts per million compared to all other terrestrial samples analysed. The deficit distinguishes these samples from the bulk silicate Earth and any known meteorite group and cannot result from magmatic processes. Therefore, we propose this 40K deficit represents primitive proto-Earth mantle domains that largely escaped mantle mixing after the giant impact and exist in the present-day deep mantle, contributing to some modern hotspot volcanism.

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Fig. 1: ε40K data for terrestrial samples.
Fig. 2: The correlation between ε40K and ε100Ru in meteorites, Earth and proto-Earth.
Fig. 3: ε40K mixing models for constraining the amount of meteoritic addition to the proto-Earth by late accretion and the giant impact.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30041293 (ref. 76). Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Ni, C. Alexander, A. Shahar and Y. Liu for helpful discussions; J. O’Neil (University of Ottawa), H. Rizo (Carleton University), A. Luttinen (Finnish Museum of Natural History), J. Reimink (Pennsylvania State University), A. Bauer (University of Wisconsin-Madison), L. Hulbert (Geological Survey of Canada), M. Bickford (Syracuse University), R. Salerno (Washington State University) and A. Kemp (The University of Western Australia) for providing samples for this study; M. Jordan for the assistance in the clean lab and T. Mock for maintaining the mass spectrometer at peak condition. This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2024YFF0807504) to D.W. and Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowships to D.W. and N.X.N.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Da Wang, Nicole X. Nie.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Planetary Science, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, China

    Da Wang

  2. Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC, USA

    Da Wang, Nicole X. Nie, Steven B. Shirey & Richard W. Carlson

  3. Key Laboratory of Earth Exploration and Information Techniques, Ministry of Education, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, China

    Da Wang

  4. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nicole X. Nie

  5. Institute for Geochemistry and Petrology, ETH, Zürich, Switzerland

    Bradley J. Peters

  6. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    James M. D. Day

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Contributions

D.W., N.X.N., R.W.C. and S.B.S. initiated and designed the study. D.W. and N.X.N. developed the analytical methods and performed the analytical work. All authors contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the data. D.W. wrote the initial draft of the paper. All authors contributed to the editing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Da Wang or Nicole X. Nie.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Three-month reproducibility of the primary K standard.

Forty-five repeated measurements of K standard yielded an ε40K two standard deviation (2 SD) of 0.28.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 The correlation between SiO2 and alkali contents of the La Réunion samples.

(a) SiO2 vs. total alkali (Na2O + K2O) (b) SiO2 vs. K2O. Data are from49. Blue circles denote the samples measured for K isotopic composition in this study. Sample RU0709, which shows no resolvable K anomaly, has the highest K2O content (0.73%) among the suite of La Réunion samples and plots above the 95% confidence interval of the correlation, suggesting a likely contamination with crustal K.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 A mixing curve showing the correlated change of K concentration and ε40K values with various degrees of crustal K addition.

The labeled percentage indicates the addition amount of crustal materials in the mixture. The blue dashed lines mark the resolvability of 40K anomaly (ε40K = ± 0.3) and the shaded area indicates no resolvable 40K anomaly. The ε40K values of OIB and crustal materials used for the mixing curve are -0.6 ± 0.1 and 0, respectively. The K2O concentrations of OIB and crustal materials are assumed to be 0.35% and 2%, respectively. The mixing curve shows that an OIB sample contaminated with >15% crustal materials would result in ε40K values unresolvable from the modern mantle.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 4 The secondary modification of Kama’ehuakanaloa (formerly Lō‘ihi) samples.

Elevated 234U/238U and 86Sr/87Sr ratios indicate seawater alteration and contamination with hydrothermally altered rocks, respectively. The most pristine sample 6K491-2 shows a resolvable K isotopic anomaly. In contrast, samples 1804-1 and 1803-16 do not show resolvable K isotopic anomalies, which may reflect the overprint of the original mantle K during alteration and crustal contamination. Data source52.

Source data

Extended Data Table 1 Parameter values used in the component mixing model
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary text, Figs. 1 and 2 and Tables 1–3.

Supplementary Tables 2 and 3

Supplementary Table 2: parameter values used to model the effect of impactor–proto-Earth mixing on the isotopic compositions of K, O, Ti, Cr and Ca of the bulk silicate Earth. Supplementary Table 3: the ε40K values of individual samples.

Source data

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Source data for Extended Data Fig. 1.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

Source data for Extended Data Fig. 2.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

Source data for Extended Data Fig. 3.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 4

Source data for Extended Data Fig 4.

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Wang, D., Nie, N.X., Peters, B.J. et al. Potassium-40 isotopic evidence for an extant pre-giant-impact component of Earth’s mantle. Nat. Geosci. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01811-3

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