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?
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.
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.
“ 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…
"Your theory that the sun is the center of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it, has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.
"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."
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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”?!
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".
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.
I respect your rant, but this ship has sailed long ago. I'm fine with arbitrary names, my pet peeve is names that are actively misleading.
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".
No, I really gotta side with him on this one, it's a huge problem in mathematics. In programming it just becomes annoying as "Joe's Text Editor" gives you something as opposed to "Joe's Polyphasic Maldovian Quirklegag" which gives you almost nothing.
(I took it to be more jovial than confrontational fwiw)
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 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.
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.
Is my point nonsense, or are you unable to see past your own pedantry?
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.
I've just had a quick search, and apparently both seussite and greigite are named after people, exactly like 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.
> 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.
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
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 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?