New mineral davemaoite discovered inside a diamond from Earth's mantle
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
I wonder how often this happens. Is it normal for minerals to occur inside of other minerals like this? Would davemaoite occur outside of diamonds? Or is it common for diamonds to be imperfect and contain other minerals, but I’m so used to them being advertised and worn in their perfect pure form?
Almost all have some inclusion.
It sounds like davemaoiteoccurs outside of diamonds as well, but won't stay stable on the earth's surface without being encased in something which maintains the pressure on it.
It's very common, not just in diamonds, and the study of inclusions in crystals can be very useful. The water in crystals thing is really cool, though.
Once our Earth’s radioactive battery fully discharges, the sun will blow away our atmosphere and we will become a desert of no life (if the expanding sun doesn’t kill everything first).
Fun to think of earth as a spaceship in a holding pattern around the sun…
"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.
"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."
Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.
"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"
"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."
"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.
To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,
"It's no use, Mr. James -- it's turtles all the way down."
From John Robert Ross' doctoral thesis, Constraints on variables in syntax. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15166
> “When we broke open the diamond, the davemaoite stayed intact for about a second, then we saw it expand and bulge under the microscope and basically turn into glass,” says Tschauner.
Science paper (paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4742
This is called a 'voucher specimen'. Obviously it's possible to make a species extinct if you kill the only one of it's kind, and the necessity of voucher specimens is a topic of debate amongst field biologists.
So awesome to see theory validated like this!
It goes the other way, too. Solar system scale forms comprised of what we might perceive to be electrostatic ripples across the face of the heliopause. I can make arguments for signs of this in our atmosphere, even.
I'm not saying they exist and are telling us to mend our ways or buy Reebok shoes or anything, but I think we dismiss the possibilities implicit in what we don't know because we don't like to think of them. HP Lovecraft was right; but the existence of the nightmare abyss is not a reason to fear, its an invitation to go skinny dipping.
It’s even worse when the name sounds stupid. “Dave”?! After somebody’s nickname, who wasn’t even a “David”?!
Thanks for making science even harder!
I for one think it's nice that we still pay tribute to people by naming newly discovered things after them, they are immortalized that way.
By the way, the mineral is named davemaoite, both Dave and Mao is from their name, not just "Dave".
Calcite is made of calcium. Magnetite is magnetic. Andesite's type locality is The Andes. Azurite is blue (azure).
Sure, there's lots of minerals, and the damage is already done in that there's a long list of minerals honoring people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals_named_after_p...
But this mineral is very special (which is why you're reading an article about it). Couldn't they have thought of some name, even Latin, having to do with the fact that it's the first known mineral from the lower mantle? From the fact that it was trapped in a diamond? That it lasted one brief second? A prefix added to "perovskite" since it's simply another form of that mineral? Or at least if naming it after a person, how about the guy who discovered it given what a cool discovery story this is.
Maybe Ho-Kwang "Dave" Mao deserves honor; give the guy an award. But as far as I can tell from the article, he has nothing to do with this mineral.
Geologists have had names like fukalite, cummingtonite, taconite, fornacite, and dickite since the 19th century so I don't think they'd even notice.
The fact that there are already bad names doesn't justify creating more bad names. If nothing else, I suppose the terrible names are memorable.
Bad names are all we've got left. There are over four thousand named minerals. How many ways can you say the words "blue" or "magnetic" in an Earthly language before you run out of words like azurite or bluite and start using ridiculous (and confusing) names like azurelite and bluilite? I hope you've got several thousand in mind (Anglicized for academia no less) because color and magnetism are two of the main ways minerals are identified. Just a google image search for the word "blue mineral" returns dozens of results in varying shades of blue, let alone turquoise or "blue-green".
What can you tell me about Fe₃O₄? _blank stare_
What can you tell me about Magnetite? A ha!
What about Fe₃Si (suessite)? Fe²⁺Fe³⁺₂S₄ (greigite)? They too are magnetic.
I don't think magnetite is even the only magnetic mineral with Fe₃O₄ and if you want to be precise it should be ferromagnetite, because every thing from Fe₂O₃ (hematite) to FeTiO₃ (ilmenite) are weakly magnetic.
“Seuss” presumably tells you something meaningful about suessite.
“Greig” presumably tells you something meaningful about greigite.
“Dave Mao” doesn’t tell you anything about davemaoite.
> Suessite is a rare iron silicide mineral with chemical formula: Fe₃Si. The mineral was named after Professor Hans E. Suess.
And:
> Greigite is an iron sulfide mineral with the chemical formula Fe2+ Fe3+ 2S 4. It is the sulfur equivalent of the iron oxide magnetite. [and was] named after the mineralogist and physical chemist Joseph W. Greig.
(From Wikipedia)
I don't understand your point because it is nonsense: magnetite was named after Magnes [1] and Pliny wrote about him and his discovery two thousand years ago. The most credible alternatives for the etymology of "magnetite" are Magnesia ad Sipylum (Manisa, TY) or Magnesia, GR, all of which existed long before the concepts of ferro- or electro-magnetism were described.
Either way, eurocentrism is the only reason you associate the word "magne-{whatever}" with the physical phenomenon.
Magnes/Manisa/Magnesia => magnetite => more than a millenium of development in physics and language => magnetism => you associating "magnetite" with "magnetic".
All words are made up.
> “Seuss” presumably tells you something meaningful about suessite.
> “Greig” presumably tells you something meaningful about greigite.
Narrator: they don't. They were keywords to search for before making a nonsensical argument.
Sure, if you insist on invoking Pliny The Elder, I'll grant you that magnetite was originally a bad name. And then humans discovered electromagnetism. Now geology students all over the world invoke a word that didn't even exist - which has the same root name as the mineral, owing to the fact that the mineral has that property. It's now a good name. And every modern geology student is thankful, because they think of "magnetism", not the thousand-year-old root of the word "magnetism" which predated our discovery of the physical phenomenon.
I wrote "presumably" in my reply to you above because I don't know or care what seussite is, and was typing on a cell phone at 2AM. The point was the point. If I flipped a boolean bit because you were trying to trick me, then all you've done is prove that those examples are also bad names rather than good names.
Names ought to have meaning, when possible, rather than being arbitrary.
If you still think that point is nonsense, and are unable to understand that argument beyond the details of an example, then you're going to have a long successful career as the guy people regret inviting to their party.
PS: Disagreeing with an argument doesn't make it nonsense.
For example oxygen, which isn't actually required to make acids but is required for burning stuff. In some languages its name comes from fire, and that makes so much more sense.
Even worse example is electron having "negative" charge or elementary particles having "spin".
> sky-blue color; pigment or paint made of powdered lapis lazuli," early 14c., from Old French azur, asur, a color name (12c.), from a false separation of Medieval Latin lazur, lazuri (as though the -l- were the French article l'), which comes from Greek lazour, from Persian lajward, from Lajward, a place in Turkestan mentioned by Marco Polo, where the stone was collected.
So there you go. Azure because of where Marco Polo happened to get a blue rock.
Call them Dave Diamonds. Or Diamond Daves. Like David Lee Roth.
I wonder what can be done with Davemaoite