Most minerals of Earth's upper mantle contain small amounts of hydrogen, structurally bound as hydroxyl (OH). The OH concentration in each mineral species is variable, in some cases reflecting the geological environment of mineral formation. Of the major mantle minerals, pyroxenes are the most hydrous, typically containing approximately 200 to 500 parts per million H(2)O by weight, and probably dominate the water budget and hydrogen geochemistry of mantle rocks that do not contain a hydrous phase. Garnets and olivines commonly contain approximately 1 to 50 parts per million. Nominally anhydrous minerals constitute a significant reservoir for mantle hydrogen, possibly accommodating all water in the depleted mantle and providing a possible mechanism to recycle water from Earth's surface into the deep mantle.

[1] Olivine is an important host of hydrogen in the Earth's upper mantle, and the OH abundance in this mineral determines many important physical properties of the planet's interior. To date, natural and experimentally hydrated olivines have been analyzed by uncalibrated spectroscopic methods with large (±100%) uncertainties in accuracy. We determined the hydrogen contents of three natural olivines by 15 N nuclear reaction analysis and used the results to calibrate the common infrared (IR) spectroscopic method for quantitative hydrogen analysis of olivine. OH content (expressed as parts per million H 2 O by weight) is 0.188 times the total integrated absorbance of the fundamental OH stretching bands in the 3750-3100 cm À1 region. The results indicate that an upward revision of some previous determinations by factors of between 2 and 4 is necessary. The most hydrous naturally occurring mantle-derived olivine analyzed to date contains 240 ppm wt. H 2 O. Retrospective application of this calibration to experimentally hydrated olivines may be limited by spectral differences in some cases and by the previous use of nonpolarized IR spectra.

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