Skip to content

Melting curves

PROTEUS uses precomputed solidus and liquidus curves from laboratory experiments and theoretical parametrizations of silicate melting. These curves define the temperatures at which a silicate material begins to melt (solidus) and becomes fully molten (liquidus) as a function of pressure.

The melting-curve exporter generates lookup tables in both pressure-temperature (P-T) and pressure-entropy (P-S) space for several literature parametrizations of peridotite / silicate melting.

What the exporter does

The script tools/solidus_func.py works with the EOS lookup tables:

  • temperature_solid.dat
  • temperature_melt.dat

These tables provide temperature as a function of entropy and pressure on structured grids. The exporter performs the following steps:

  1. Build solidus and liquidus curves in P-T space from literature fits.
  2. Convert those curves into P-S space by inverting the EOS relation \(T(S, P)\).
  3. Resample the solidus and liquidus entropy curves onto a common pressure grid.
  4. Save both the P-T and P-S versions to disk for later use by PROTEUS.

Available parametrizations

The following directory names are supported and should be used exactly as written in the TOML configuration in the melting_dir parameter:

Directory name Reference DOI
andrault_2011 Andrault et al. (2011) 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.006
monteux_2016 Monteux et al. (2016) 10.1016/j.epsl.2016.05.010
wolf_bower_2018 Wolf & Bower (2018) 10.1016/j.pepi.2017.11.004
10.1051/0004-6361/201935710
katz_2003 Katz et al. (2003) 10.1029/2002GC000433
fei_2021 Fei et al. (2021) 10.1038/s41467-021-21170-y
belonoshko_2005 Belonoshko et al. (2005) 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.195701
fiquet_2010 Fiquet et al. (2010) 10.1126/science.1192448
hirschmann_2000 Hirschmann (2000) 10.1029/2000GC000070
stixrude_2014 Stixrude (2014) 10.1098/rsta.2013.0076
lin_2024 Lin et al. (2024) 10.1038/s41561-024-01495-1

Generate melting curves

Before running PROTEUS, generate the lookup tables:

python tools/solidus_func.py --all

Alternatively, generate a single parametrization using a specific flag (for example --katz2003, --lin2024).

This computes all parametrizations, converts them to P-T and P-S space, and stores them in:

$FWL_DATA/interior_lookup_tables/Melting_curves/

See also: Interior structure and energetics reference | Configuration file | Reference data