CONTEXT

Water is essential for human existence, indeed for life’s beginning. The circulation of water and other fluids lubricates the deep-seated dynamics that keep Earth geologically alive, and its surface habitable. Several oceans worth of water may be present inside Earth, and the exchange of water and other fluids between the surface and the deep interior plays a crucial role in most Earth systems, including the evolution of the surface, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the development of giant ore deposits.

Subduction - the descent of oceanic plates into the mantle - carries water down into Earth’s interior; dehydration of the subducting crustal slabs at high pressure and temperature releases these fluids into the mantle, causing melting and controlling the strength, viscosity, melting temperature and density of rocks in the deep Earth, as well as the structure of major seismic discontinuities at 410 and 660 km depth. The partial return of some of these materials to the surface through mantle-plume activity provides a mechanism for tectonic cyclicity, which may have varied over geological time. These effects dominate solid-Earth dynamics and make plate tectonics possible, but the origin, abundance, speciation and movements of fluids in the deep interior are largely unknown, and represent key issues in modern geoscience.

Until recently, a real understanding of the workings of Earth’s deep plumbing system has been tantalisingly out of our reach. Now, rapid advances in geophysics are producing stunning new images of variations in physical properties such as seismic velocity and electrical conductivity in the deep Earth, but interpretation of these images in terms of processes and Earth’s evolution is only in its developmental stages. It requires new kinds of data on deep-Earth materials, and especially on the effects of deep fluids and their circulation.

To provide the knowledge needed to reach a new level of understanding of Earth’s evolution, dynamics and fluid cycle(s) through time, CCFS integrates information across geology, tectonics, experimental and analytical geochemistry, petrophysics, geophysics, and petrophysical and dynamical modelling. These disciplines have traditionally represented ‘research silos’, but CCFS has brought them together to provide a significant increase in our national research capability.

CENTRE RESEARCH

Research programs within the Centre are focused to provide maximum synergy for the scope enabled by the resource base.  As it is not possible to encompass the full range of research about the Earth’s fluid cycle and deep Earth dynamics, all applied and mature strategic research is carried out in parallel, supported by other funding sources.  The Research Program structure was revised in 2014 to ensure the overarching goals were being fulfilled.  The resulting Flagship Programs were put in place as cross-node streams contributing to the three global Themes (Early Earth, Earth Evolution and Earth Today). 

These are structured to capitalise on the people and resource context of the Centre in a way not possible with a shorter timeframe, or without the critical mass of research expertise, depth and breadth.  More detailed information is given in “The CCFS Research Program” and “Research Highlights”.

In order to track the input of coalescing strands, the concept of programs contributing to understanding Earth Architecture and/or Fluid Fluxes helps track the pieces of the giant 4-dimensional Earth puzzle being solved by CCFS and encapsulates the relationship of all the CCFS programs to Earth ‘fluids’.

“Architecture” is the ‘roadmap’ for fluids

“Fluid Fluxes” represents the ‘traffic report’

 All Research highlights and Projects are now keyed to this framework shown diagrammatically below:

THEMES