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Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Volume 53, 2025

Isotope Evolution of the Depleted Mantle

  • Jeffrey D. Vervoort1 and Anthony I.S. Kemp2
  • 1School of the Environment, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA; email: [email protected] 2School of Earth Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
  • Vol. 53:195-221 (Volume publication date May 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on December 17, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The depleted mantle reservoir is that part of Earth's mantle from which crust has been extracted, leaving the remaining mantle depleted in incompatible elements. Knowing how and when it formed is essential for understanding the chemical evolution of Earth, including formation of continental crust. The best-constrained Hf isotope data presented here indicate that the mantle does not become significantly depleted until as late as 700 million years after Earth's accretion. This onset of mantle depletion coincides with the first appearance of substantial volumes of continental crust in the geological record. These data compel a revision to the reference depleted mantle parameters used in Hf isotope studies of planetary evolution. This new reference line follows chondritic evolution until 3.8 Ga and then describes a linear trajectory to a present-day depleted mid-ocean ridge basalt source mantle composition (ε = +18). We infer that stabilization of continental crust only occurred in earnest on Earth after 3.8 Ga.

  • ▪  Hf isotopes show that Earth's mantle does not become significantly depleted until 700 million years after planetary accretion.
  • ▪  Most of Earth's oldest rocks formed from mantle sources that had radiogenic isotope compositions similar to those of chondritic meteorites.
  • ▪  Isotope evidence shows that Hadean (>4.0-billion-year-old) crust was not essential for formation of younger crust in Archean terranes.
  • ▪  Growth of Earth's continents only began in earnest after 3.8 Ga.

Keyword(s): continental crust formation, depleted mantle, early Earth, geochemical evolution, hafnium isotopes, neodymium isotopes, U-Pb geochronology
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Isotope Evolution of the Depleted Mantle
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 53, 195 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-031621-112052
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