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Science 8 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5928, pp. 736 - 739
DOI: 10.1126/science.1165871
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Review

Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust

Harry Y. McSween, Jr.,1,* G. Jeffrey Taylor,2 Michael B. Wyatt3

The composition of Mars’ crust records the planet’s integrated geologic history and provides clues to its differentiation. Spacecraft and meteorite data now provide a global view of the chemistry of the igneous crust that can be used to assess this history. Surface rocks on Mars are dominantly tholeiitic basalts formed by extensive partial melting and are not highly weathered. Siliceous or calc-alkaline rocks produced by melting and/or fractional crystallization of hydrated, recycled mantle sources, and silica-poor rocks produced by limited melting of alkali-rich mantle sources, are uncommon or absent. Spacecraft data suggest that martian meteorites are not representative of older, more voluminous crust and prompt questions about their use in defining diagnostic geochemical characteristics and in constraining mantle compositional models for Mars.

1 Planetary Geosciences Institute and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996–1410, USA.
2 Hawai’i Institute for Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA.
3 Department of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912–1846, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mcsween{at}utk.edu

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