As different volcanoes erupt, those with lava can have significantly different amounts of dissolved gasses, different viscosities, and so on. Why isn’t this fluid more uniform? Is there something structural about the earth that prevents magma from mixing? Is it even all a liquid?
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Well, the structure of the earth at different volcanoes isn’t uniform. Different environmental conditions and lifeforms in an environment will have varying material compositions. If there’s a lot of water, like an aquifer in the general vicinity, that can also greatly alter the composition.
This becomes clearer when you consider how heat affects a solution. As part of the solution heats up, it will rise up in the solution, while the cooler components will gravitate toward the bottom, creating currents within the solution, causing the materials and solutes to not uniformly settle into a convenient solution. On top of that, we haven’t really analyzed the mantle layer of the Earth to understand what all exactly is in there. …..
.. Anyway, when molecules and atoms get superheated, the fundamental structure of the atoms becomes much less uniform. In plasma, for example, atoms and molecules are pretty much a goop of all the protons, neutrons and electrons, since thermal equilibrium is much, much different than on the surface. Furthermore, the pressure that the layers of the Earth place on the deeper layers also changes up the equilibrium and energy barriers for reactions. So… when the solution goes from being superheated to being cooled down… the chemical disorder starts to reorder itself. What components it cools down to depends entirely on what is in its general vicinity/proximity. It’s not like the atoms and molecules will just magically find each other and reorganize to an easily predictable product. There’s just way too many variables to be able to get any sort of singular uniform model for that. Add to that, that tectonic plate shifts can also induce eruptions and then you’d have to be able to know what the composition of the edge of the plates are at any given time. Not easily predictable. I mean, we have analytical tools to be able to get a general idea of what atoms may be present in a given area, but that may not be able to tell you enough about what molecular organization is.
tl;dr: different regions of the earth have different chemical compositions.
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