Surface tension of iron hydride formed by the reaction of iron-silicate-water at 5GPa and high temperature was studied based on the texture observation of the quenched samples. It was found that the surface tension of iron hydride is much larger compared with that of the silicates. Therefore, in a mixture of partially molten silicates and molten iron hydride, the iron hydride tends to accumulate into disconnected pockets and percolation is hard to occur. This result implies that in the proto Earth, the gravitational separation of the molten iron from the partially molten silicates could occur only when the degree of melting of silicates was very high.
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Hishinuma et al. (1994) studied this question.