No abstract

High‐pressure silica polymorphs may contribute to lithologies in Earth's lower mantle. Stishovite, the tetragonal rutile‐type polymorph of SiO2, distorts to an orthorhombic CaCl2‐type structure at pressures and temperatures of the lower mantle. We compressed sintered polycrystalline stishovite and determined the unit cell parameters as a function of pressure using synchrotron X‐ray diffraction. The compression behavior of sintered polycrystalline stishovite deviates systematically from previous results on stishovite powder and single crystals. Following an initial stiffening, the bulk modulus of sintered polycrystalline stishovite drops at the ferroelastic phase transition. We analyzed the observed spontaneous strains using Landau theory to predict the complete elastic behavior of sintered polycrystalline silica across the phase transition. The reduction in bulk modulus at the phase transition as derived here from the compression curve of sintered polycrystalline silica may have implications for the seismic detection of silica‐rich materials in Earth's lower mantle.

We experimentally determined the bulk modulus of (Mg0.8Fe0.2)O ferropericlase across the iron spin transition and in the low‐spin phase by employing a new experimental approach. In our measurements, we simulate the propagation of a compressional seismic wave (P wave) through our sample by employing a piezo‐driven dynamic diamond anvil cell that allows to oscillate pressure at seismic frequencies. During pressure oscillations, X‐ray diffraction images were continuously collected every 5–50 ms. The bulk modulus is directly calculated from these data at different pressures. Our experiments show a pronounced softening of the bulk modulus throughout the spin crossover, supporting previous single‐crystal measurements at very high frequencies and computations. Comparison of our results to previous data collected on (Mg,Fe)O with lower iron contents shows that the magnitude of softening strongly depends on iron content. Our experiments at seismic frequencies confirm that the iron spin crossover markedly affects the ratio of seismic compressional to shear wave velocities in Earth's lower mantle.