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In the year 2,000, a Chinese dealer purchased an unusual-looking rock weighing around a ton. He cleaned it off, removing 20 kilograms (44 lb) from it, and then took the rock (a gleaming mass of crystals and iron) to a Gem and Mineral Show in Tucson, Arizona. At the show, Dr. Dante Lauretta, a professor […]
Cement and clay bricks could be replaced with olivine-based alternatives.
For once, it's not something to do with global warming, phew!
A new study may have finally found where Earth’s water came from. There are currently two competing theories, with one claiming that our planet generated its own water geologically, while the other suggests that water was brought by icy comets or asteroids from outside. A new study concluded that most of the water we see […]
Do you fancy diamonds? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you’ll absolutely love this rock extracted from a Russian mine. The rock is littered with over 30,000 diamonds, something which is extremely rare and may yield valuable information about how diamonds form in natural conditions. What’s unlucky for gem sellers was very fortunate for researchers […]
The first ever terrestrial discovery of ringwoodite seems to confirm the existence of massive amounts of water hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface. Let me explain how. Under pressure Ringwoodite is a high-pressure polymorph of olivine; it’s basically olivine, but with a different crystal structure. The mineral is thought to exist in large quantities […]
A magnitude 8.3 earthquake that struck deep beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on May 24, 2013 still poses a lot of questions to geophysicists. At a depth of about 609 kilometers (378 miles), the kind of rupture which generates an earthquake of this magnitude should just not happen. The vast majority of significant earthquakes takes […]
The cold, lifeless Vesta asteroid might be a lot more like our planet than astronomers believed – having a very active life in the early stages of the solar system evolution, a study of a Saharan meteorite shows. The planet that wasn’t Vesta might host a magmatic layer under its rocky exterior, allowing minerals to […]
