The study of iron under extreme conditions has a long history. In particular, numerous attempts have been made to obtain its high-pressure melting properties [1–9] . Experimentally, Earth’s core conditions can only be reproduced by shock wave (SW) experiments in which a high-speed projectile is fired at an iron sample, and upon impact high-pressure and high-temperature conditions are produced. By varying the speed of the projectile it is possible to investigate a characteristic pressure-volume relation known as the Hugoniot [10] and even infer temperatures, although a word of caution here is in order as temperature estimates are often based on the knowledge of quantities such as the constant volume specific heat and the Grüneisen parameter, which are only approximately known at the relevant conditions [7] . If the speed of the projectile is high enough, the conditions of pressure and temperature are such that the sample melts, and it is therefore possible to obtain points on the melting curve, of course with the caveat mentioned above about temperature measurements. An alternative route to high-pressure, hightemperature properties is the use of diamond anvil cells (DAC)in which the sample is surrounded by a pressure medium and statically compressed between two diamond anvils. In DAC experiments pressure and temperatures can be directly measured, and therefore these techniques should in principle be more reliable to investigate melting properties. Unfortunately, in the case of iron it is not so and there is a fairly large range of results obtained by different groups [1–6] .