Melting of Fe - alloys and the thermal structure of the core

11 The temperature of the Earth’s core has significant implications in many areas of 12 geophysics, including applications to Earth’s heat flow, core composition, age of the 13 inner core, and energetics of the geodynamo. The temperature of the core at the inner 14 core boundary is equal to the melting temperature of the core’s Fe-rich alloy at the inner 15 core boundary pressure. This chapter is a review of experimental results on melting 16 temperatures of iron and Fe-rich alloys at core conditions that can thus be used to infer 17 core temperatures. Large discrepancies exist between published melting curves for pure 18 iron at high pressures, with better agreement on the melting behavior of Fe–light element 19 alloys. The addition of silicon causes a small melting point depression in iron, while 20 oxygen and especially sulfur cause larger melting point depressions. The inner core 21 boundary temperature likely falls in the range 5150–6200 K, depending on the identity of 22 the light element(s) in the core, which leads to a core–mantle boundary temperature of 23