New Mineral Discovered In A Diamond

India Times

A new mineral has been discovered deep inside Earth’s mantle, wrapped inside a diamond. The never-before-seen mineral sheds light on the unexplored secrets that remain hidden in Earth’s different layers.

Mantle is the immediate layer below the crust on which humans live. Beneath the mantle exists the Earth’s outer core, inside which is situated our planet’s inner core. With the discovery of this new mineral, scientists hope to find more clues about the physical characteristics of Earth’s deeper layers. In turn, shifts in tectonic plates and other physiological changes in Earth’s layer could be better understood and predicted.

Officially called “calcium silicate perovskite,” the mineral can only form under extremely high pressures that are possible only in the deepest throes of Earth. According to Scientific American, the newly-discovered mineral could have formed 660-900 kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface.

Earlier, the mineral was synthesised in a lab setting with 200,000 times the pressure in our atmosphere (20 gigapascals), the material returned to its original form as soon the artificial pressure was taken off. Based on this finding, scientists assumed that natural calcium silicate perovskite would never be retrieved by scientists.

Three extremely minute pieces of calcium silicate perovskite were discovered by scientists from Orapa in Botswana, and the discovery was announced in Science on Thursday and led by Oliver Tschauner of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Diamonds are considered the gateway into Earth’s deepest layers, for it is the only naturally occurring substance that doesn’t change its form under extremely high pressures. The mineral has been named “davemaoite” to honour Ho-Kwang “Dave” Mao who conducted some of the first experiments on diamonds to replicate high-pressure environments.