Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral

https://www.livescience.com/new-mantle-mineral-found-in-diamond

by prostoalex • 5 years ago

119 32 5 years ago

cyb_• 5 years ago

In case you are wondering:

Named davemaoite after prominent geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, the mineral is the first example of a high-pressure calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) found on Earth.

iratewizard• 4 years ago

To add to the tl;dr: the "never-before seen" is long since theoretically known, but davemaoite usually breaks down on its way up to the surface.

loonster• 5 years ago

A few micrometers in size. I dont think in micrometers, so I must convert to a more familiar unit. A few .001mm in size. That's tiny. An average piece of paper is .1mm thick. This is around the size of the thickness of ink on the paper.

COGlory• 5 years ago

30 or so coronaviruses side by side.

Razengan• 4 years ago

How many would fit in a football field?

abduhl• 5 years ago

A few micrometers is around 1E-4 inches or 3E-6 yards for those of us who think in freedom units (aka real units).

JshWright5• 5 years ago

You joke, but this would (perhaps even more absurdly, really) be called a "tenth" by most people who care about imperial units at this scale (as explained in a sibling comment)

version_five3• 5 years ago

This is pretty anti-intellectual isn't it? People, in my opinion rightly, make fun of measures expressed in libraries of congress or Olympic pools or African elephants, and then an article actually uses a normal SI measure and that gets disparaged too? What are authors supposed to do?

sgc• 5 years ago

There was nothing disparaging about the comment. There is also nothing anti-intellectual about comparing things you don't know to things you do, in order to contextualize information. And he did that by first converting to mm, so did not abandon SI measurements at all. I agree that when we are talking about more common measurements it can be gratuitous or grandstanding, much like talking about things over 1x size in percent, as e.g. 450% bigger, etc. But that is not the case here.

JshWright5• 5 years ago

Yeah, for folks with experience in machining (in the US), this is a "tenth" (a pretty fundamental unit in machining is a thousandth of an inch, or a "thou", for very high precision work, that can be divided into "tenths", or ten thousandths of an inch).

YZF• 4 years ago

A mil, or a thou, really isn't good enough for high precision work. 25.4 microns is a lot. A surface flat to that isn't really that flat. An instrument that measures to that isn't really a very high precision instrument. Microns are a pretty good unit.

EDIT: There's this rule of thumb (I might be getting this slightly wrong) that one in a million accuracy/precision is about what you can expect to achieve without resulting to exotic means (at least order of magnitude). So microns of flatness over a meter e.g. Trying that with imperial units just breaks my mind, what's a million mils. Sure I can calculate that. But it's like a pretty useless measure. So accuracy of one thou over a million mils is sort of weird. (1000 inches which I'd have to translate to some normal unit... 25.4 meters ;) ).

lancebeet• 4 years ago

I think "a tenth of the thickness of a human hair" would be an appropriate layman description of the approximate size.

version_five3• 5 years ago

The most interesting part or me was that the diamond came from 600km below the earth's surface. Maybe this is common knowledge, not for me. It's pretty cool to think that we have access to such things. If we could dig down that far, would there be an abundance of diamonds?

djdjfhsje33edh• 5 years ago

The article says the diamond formed at that depth, but I assume the rock rose to a higher depth before it was extracted. I believe the deepest depth to which we have drilled is on the order of 10 km.

JshWright5• 5 years ago

The Kola borehole, drilled by the Soviets, is the deepest we've ever drilled, at 12.2 km.

markdown• 4 years ago

There's an abundance of diamonds right here on the surface (or near it). Diamond supply is artificially constrained.

Scarblac• 4 years ago

And we can manufacture them cheaply.

_nalply• 4 years ago

They were transported to the surface with eruptions ten to hundred millions of years ago. Google «Kimberlite».

ineedasername• 5 years ago

It's always strange to thing of the vast distances we can send things into space compared to our inability to travel extremely short distances beneath our feet.

version_five3• 5 years ago

To be fair, theres a lot more stuff in the way traveling downward

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29209015

14• 4 years ago

Anyone else have a constant reload of the site no matter what I do it reloads within seconds?

lostlogin• 4 years ago

I love this naming convention, I didn’t think that happened anymore.

Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral

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