New research on the movement of iron through silicate rocks by Stanford Unversity has the potential to change our view about how the Earth's core formed. Professor Wendy Mao and her team have discovered that iron can percolate through silicate minerals which means that our idea of the mantle and core being distinct bodies from the earliest stage of formation of the planet may be wrong. Instead we can have a model where after our planet aggregated there was a gradual evolution of the internal structure as the materials differentiated by percolation under the influence of gravity.
The implications of this discovery may be that data we get from meteorites may not give us a good control on the bulk composition of the Earth. It seems that we have a lot more to discover about our planet.
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