Magnesium carbonates have been identified within the landing site of the Perseverance rover mission. This study reviews terrestrial analog environments and textural, mineral assemblage, isotopic, and elemental analyses that have been applied to establish formation conditions of magnesium carbonates. Magnesium carbonates form in five distinct settings: ultramafic rock-hosted veins, the matrix of carbonated peridotite, nodules in soil, alkaline lake, and playa deposits, and as diagenetic replacements within lime-and dolostones. Dominant textures include fine-grained or microcrystalline veins, nodules, and crusts. Microbial influences on formation are recorded in thrombolites, stromatolites, crinkly, and pustular laminites, spheroids, and filamentous microstructures. Mineral assemblages, fluid inclusions, and carbon, oxygen, magnesium, and clumped isotopes of carbon and oxygen have been used to determine the sources of carbon, magnesium, and fluid for magnesium carbonates as well as their temperatures of formation. Isotopic signatures in ultramafic rock-hosted magnesium carbonates reveal that they form by either low-temperature meteoric water infiltration and alteration, hydrothermal alteration, or metamorphic processes. Isotopic compositions of lacustrine magnesium carbonate record precipitation from lake water, evaporation processes, and ambient formation temperatures. Assessment of these features with similar analytical techniques applied to returned Martian samples can establish whether carbonates on ancient Mars were formed at high or low temperature conditions in the surface or subsurface through abiotic or biotic processes. The timing of carbonate formation processes could be constrained by
Impurity ion and isotope partitioning into carbonate minerals provide a window into the molecular processes occurring at the fluid-mineral interface during crystal growth. Here, we employ calcium isotope fractionation together with process-based modeling to elucidate the mechanisms by which two divalent cations with starkly contrasting compatibility, magnesium and manganese, inhibit calcite growth and incorporate into the mineral lattice. Calcite growth inhibition by Mg2+ is log-linear and KMg is on the order of 0.02–0.03 throughout the range of {Mg2+}/{Ca2+} studied here (0.01–2.6). Mn2+ exhibits much stronger log-linear growth rate inhibition at low Mn2+ concentrations (fluid {Mn2+}/{Ca2+} = 0.001–0.02). Mn2+ is readily incorporated into the calcite lattice to form a calcite-rhodochrosite solid solution, with large partition coefficients (KMn 4.6–15.6) inversely correlated to growth rate. For both Mn2+ and Mg2+, calcium isotope fractionation is found to be invariant with {Me2+}/{Ca2+} despite more than an order of magnitude decline in growth rate. This invariant Δ44/40Ca suggests that the presence of Mn2+ or Mg2+ does not significantly change the relative rates of Ca2+ attachment and detachment at kink sites during growth, indicative of a dominantly kink blocking inhibition mechanism. Because the partitioning behavior dictates that Mn2+ must attach to the surface significantly faster than Ca2+, attachment of Mn2+ is likely to be as a non-monomer species such as an ion pair or possibly a larger polynuclear cluster. We propose that calcite growth rate inhibition by Mn is determined by the kinetics of carbonate attachment at Mn-occupied kink sites, potentially due to slow re-orientation kinetics of carbonate ions that have formed an inner-sphere complex with Mn2+ at the surface but must reorient to incorporate into the lattice. We demonstrate that patterns in Mg2+ partitioning and inhibition behavior are broadly consistent with growth inhibition driven by slow Mg2+-aquo complex dehydration relative to Ca2+ but argue that this mechanism likely represents one endmember scenario, seen in Mg-calcite growth at low supersaturations and net precipitation rates. During growth at faster net precipitation rates, some portion of Mg2+ is likely incorporated as a partially hydrated or otherwise complexed species, but calcite growth remains significantly inhibited by the kinetics of CO32− attachment at Mg2+ kink sites. These findings suggest a hybrid classical/nonclassical growth mechanism whereby Ca2+ incorporates largely as a free ion at kink sites while Mn2+ and some portion of Mg2+ are incorporated via non-monomer attachment. This pattern may be generalizable; trace constituent cations with aquo-complex desolvation rates significantly slower than the mineral growth rate preferentially incorporate as a non-monomer species during otherwise classical crystal growth.
Abstract We have designed, built, tested, and deployed a novel device to extract porewater from deep‐sea sediments in situ, constructed to work with a standard multicorer. Despite the importance of porewater measurements for numerous applications, many sampling artifacts can bias data and interpretation during traditional porewater processing from shipboard‐processed cores. A well‐documented artifact occurs in deep‐sea porewater when carbonate precipitates during core recovery as a function of temperature and pressure changes, while porewater is in contact with sediment grains before filtration, thereby lowering porewater alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). Here, we present a novel device built to obviate these sampling artifacts by filtering porewater in situ on the seafloor, with a focus near the sediment–water interface on cm‐scale resolution, to obtain accurate porewater profiles. We document 1–10% alkalinity loss in shipboard‐processed sediment cores compared to porewater filtered in situ, at depths of 1600–3200 m. We also show that alkalinity loss is a function of both weight % sedimentary CaCO 3 and water column depth. The average ratio of alkalinity loss to DIC loss in shipboard‐processed sediment cores relative to in situ porewater is 2.2, consistent with the signal expected from carbonate precipitation. In addition to collecting porewater for defining natural profiles, we also conducted the first in situ dissolution experiments within the sediment column using isotopically labeled calcite. We present evidence of successful deployments of this device on and adjacent to the Cocos Ridge in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific across a range of depths and calcite saturation states.
