Melting of Fe2O3 Hematite up to 20 GPa

Hematite (Fe2O3) is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth's surface and in the shallow crust. Hematite is one of the major components of banded iron formations (BIFs) and ironstones and its high-pressure high-temperature (HP-HT) behaviour may therefore have significant consequences for modelling of the earth’s interior as reported in [1]. In spite of such an apparent crucial interest, high pressure melting experiments on this prototype material are lacking. This is why we propose here to investigate HP-HT) behaviour of Fe2O3 hematite using X-Ray diffraction at ID06-LVP ESRF beamline of the ESRF in order to determine in the P-T space: i) the decomposition conditions of Fe2O3 = Fe3O4 + O2, ii) the melting of hematite Fe2O3 (s) = Fe2O3 (l), 3i) potential formation of other oxides as Fe-O P-T phase diagram was recently reported to be richer than previously thought (FeO2, Fe4O5, Fe5O7, Fe25O32, …). Note that our preliminary studies indicate no decomposition at P ≥ 10 GPa.