New mineral davemaoite discovered inside a diamond from Earth's mantle

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2296899-new-mineral-davemaoite-discovered-inside-a-diamond-from-earths-mantle/

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

118 39 5 years ago

sandgiant• 5 years ago

No one has ever successfully retrieved a high-pressure calcium silicate from the lower mantle before. This is because the high-pressure CaSiO3-perovskite is “unquenchable,” meaning that it cannot retain its structure after being removed from its high-pressure environment.
“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

kwonkicker• 5 years ago

Oh man, they killed the only davemaoite we ever had, it's so sad

msrenee2• 5 years ago

But now that they know where to look for it, I'm pretty sure they'll find more.

cbozeman• 5 years ago

Biologists do this as well. Once we encounter a new species, it's killed and then studied.

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.

celeritascelery• 5 years ago

It would be so cool to have a video of that moment!

steve_adams_86• 5 years ago

This is fascinating in that if the davemaoite wasn’t encased in a diamond, we’d never see it. It came back to the surface in this perfect little package to be discovered.

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?

bozhark• 5 years ago

It’s rare to have a perfect clarity diamond.

Almost all have some inclusion.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

Well, if you're finding the diamond. You can make them as perfect as you want.

msrenee2• 5 years ago

It's very normal for minerals to occur inside of other minerals. It's called an inclusion. This can be another mineral or liquid like water or petroleum. It's really cool to see a piece of quartz with a little pocket of water that's been trapped inside for millenia.

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.

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhydro_agate

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.

dataflow• 5 years ago

The tiny crystals turned out to be a form of calcium silicate that was theorised to exist in the lower mantle but had never actually been observed before.

So awesome to see theory validated like this!

shironandon• 5 years ago

It feels disappointing that they "cracked it open" but I guess this was for science. Now it has depressurized it would take a significant amount of energy to pressurize davemoaite for exciting experiments similar to those taken to explore superionic ice.

_Microft• 5 years ago

Diamond anvil cells should be able to reach the given pressure (20 GPa?) easily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell

driggs6• 5 years ago

It makes me sad every time a mineral, chemical, or species is named after some arbitrary human (or worse) because the name is arbitrary, telling you nothing about the thing itself or diagnostic differences from similar things.

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!

capableweb• 5 years ago

Names are just names, after a while you'll get used to it. Not sure how you can claim that Ho-Kwang (Dave) Mao was not named "Dave", you get the name you claim to have, so in my mind, Dave is indeed named Dave.

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".

driggs6• 5 years ago

Names are NOT just names, unless you believe that all of science should involve rote memorization of arbitrary labels.

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.

JetAlone• 5 years ago

I don't mind the naming scheme but I think it's just kind of hard to say DaveMaoite. Reversing to Maodaveite would have been better IMO.

Igelau3• 5 years ago

At first I thought it was dah-VEM-ā-oh-ite.

Call them Dave Diamonds. Or Diamond Daves. Like David Lee Roth.

aulin• 5 years ago

not against giving people names to minerals per se, but at least chose a name that you can write in a phonetic language. davemaoite only sounds good if you read it in english pronounce

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

“ Davemaoite is thought to make up about 5 per cent of Earth’s lower mantle and is important because it is theorised that the mineral can also host radioactive elements like uranium, thorium and potassium-40 that heat Earth as they decay. “Without these radioactive elements, the Earth would have cooled by now,” says David Phillips at the University of Melbourne in Australia.”

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…

andy_ppp• 5 years ago

Or the solar system flying through space and time towards its destination while it evolves the real cargo.

ezconnect• 5 years ago

This is the hardest part when I try to imagine the vastness of the universe, we are flying on what and does it end?

gonesilent• 5 years ago

I always thought a neat solar probe would be something that comes to a dead stop.

sam_goody• 5 years ago

Moissanite was allegedly discovered in a similar fashion, and the result has been that millions of people no longer use "blood" diamonds, and lab-grown diamonds were able to get a foot in the door.

I wonder what can be done with Davemaoite

h2odragon• 5 years ago

Ever think how deep our ignorance here is? I do. I like to imagine life forms with molten iron bloodstreams; magma amoeba debating whether life could exists in the near vaccum conditions of the vacuum transition zone where "everything vital to life" is cold and crystalline and dead.

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.

New mineral davemaoite discovered inside a diamond from Earth's mantle

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