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…
> 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.
> 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".
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.
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] msrenee|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bozhark|4 years ago|reply
Almost all have some inclusion.
[+] [-] robbedpeter|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandgiant|4 years ago|reply
> “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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celeritascelery|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dataflow|4 years ago|reply
So awesome to see theory validated like this!
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shironandon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
[+] [-] driggs|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] JetAlone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
Call them Dave Diamonds. Or Diamond Daves. Like David Lee Roth.
[+] [-] aulin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam_goody|4 years ago|reply
I wonder what can be done with Davemaoite