  Recent XMM-Newton observations of clusters of galaxies have provided detailed
information on the distribution of heavy elements in the central regions of
clusters with cooling cores providing strong evidence that most of these metals
come from recent SN type Ia. In this paper we compile information on the
cumulative mass profiles of iron, the most important metallicity tracer. We
find that long enrichment times (larger than 5 Gyr) are necessary to produce
the central abundance peaks. Classical cooling flows, a strongly convective
intracluster medium, and a complete metal mixing by cluster mergers would
destroy the observed abundance peaks too rapidly. Thus the observations set
strong constraints on cluster evolution models requiring that the cooling cores
in clusters are preserved over very long times. We further conclude from the
observations that the innermost part of the intracluster medium is most
probably dominated by gas originating predominantly from stellar mass loss of
the cD galaxy.
