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Meteorite Strike Creates New Type of Mineral
Ridgelift writes "Chinese researchers have discovered a new mineral created by a meteorite strike. A new form of chromite was discovered in the shock veins formed by the impact of the Suizhou meteorite. 'The shock of the impact created temperatures of about 2000C and pressures like those at 600 kilometres below the Earth.' Researcher Professor Hugh O'Neill says 'This potentially gives us clues to the orbital velocities of two bodies that come together to produce these shock collisions.' Along with the rare find, the researchers who discovered the new mineral get to name it."
Shouldn't the naming of a chemical be up to a standards body to decide? Take the primary color Squant as an example of the wrongheadedness of letting something's discoverer name it.
I have been pwned because my
Kryptonite!
Hey, if you bang rocks together enough, do you think you'd ever end up with Naquadah?
Kryptonite
That would be a cool and totally original name!
A previous post of known minor planets in our solar system.
Subduction leads to orogeny
Is this really Slashdot material (pun unintentional)?
A blog like any other.
I'm really not sure that this is very significant news. This does not appear to be a far reaching discovery, rather I think it "made the papers" because meteorites are cool and exciting, and a new mineral sounds novel.
On the topic of minerals:
Mineral names are always interesting. They often have absolutely no relation to the substance they identify, let alone follow a systematic naming convention. Many minerals have several names, some more accepted than others, some designated long before geology was a science, and most with little reason and only slightly more rhyme. So, since the names don't have to make sense, discoverers have a lot of leeway when naming minerals.
Apparently this got started in the early days of geology before people figured out any chemistry. When someone found a chunk of something, it would get whatever random name seemed good at the time. Unfortunately, after chemistry was discovered, no effort was made to go backward and rename all the old minerals. So mineral names are something of chaos. We have minerals from actinolite, to kaolinite, to rutile, to zircon, and thousands of others that are almost completely meaningless to any well educated person who doesn't already know what they are.
Chemistry, in its early formitive days as a real science, noticed the mess geologists had made of that nomenclature, and wisely decided to systematize chemical names. Of course mineral compositions are covered under the wider blanket of inorganic chemistry, but geologists still don't refer to minerals by systematic chemical names.
Here's a real example of how silly things can get:
One day around 1977 a geologist discovered a new mineral, and thus got to name it. He wanted to honor another geologist who had the last name of Thompson, but discovered to his dismay that there was already a mineral named thompsonite. But not to be deterred from his original intent, and knowing Mr. Thompson's first name was Jim, he dubbed the new mineral jimthompsonite. Which was all well-and-good, but later a monoclinic variation of the mineral was discovered, so it was named (following scant conventions) clinojimthompsonite.
But that doesn't really tell you too much about the mineral. For the record, clinojimthompsonite is a soft amphibole group mineral.
Guidelines for naming a new mineral generally revolve around how easy it is to pronounce, whether it honors someone in the field, and how much like some other mineral name it sounds. Compare this to the process for naming martian craters!
It's really not too weird to discover new minerals, although it's also not exceptionally commonplace; there are a lot of different ways to combine the naturally occurring elements in inorganic crystals at the Earth's range of temperatures and pressures.
Definition of a mineral, with examples:
For the record, a mineral is commonly accepted to be a mineral given all the following:
(Note: these criteria aren't exactly set in stone, but I can't think of anything that's regarded as a mineral that doesn't fit them.)
inorganic
solid
ordered crystal structure
definite chemical composition
naturally occurring
From a practical point of view, if it's a naturally occurring crystal with a unique X-ray diffraction pattern, it shouldn't be too surprising if it's accepted as a new mineral.
A few examples of what aren't minerals:
Obsidian (volcanic glass) can't be a mineral because it doesn't have an ordered crystal structure.
Coal isn't a mineral because, among others, it is organic.
Various formulas of steel aren't minerals because although they're crystalline (microscopically), they are man made.
Isn't that in space somewhere?
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
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I propose they name it Bob. Everyone likes, Bob!
Actually, I don't think there is a real mineral named kryptonite, so it might still be available. And, hell, it's not much worse than most other mineral names!
All we really need is some geologist with the last name of Krypton to discover something, and I bet there'd be a mineral named after him/her in a heartbeat.
There's no existing mineral called Kryptonite, but there is an inert gas called Krypton. It's with those other ones like neon, argon, etc on the periodic table. So I always thought that "Kryptonite" ought to be a compound or weird allotrope of Krypton, like the Carbonite Han Solo is frozen in presumably has Carbon in it, or is an as-yet-undiscovered allotrope of Carbon particularly suitable for petrifying spacefaring bad-boys.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
What if they named it something dirty and disgusting? Would the scientific community honour the name?
Names of minerals are a tricky subject, and there are a lot of fallacies- a mineral may have a chemical composition, a common use name, and belong to a general group of closely-related compounds. Because of this, the guidelines do exist. It's not unlike trying to name a species of organisms.A history of the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names (CNMMN) demonstrates that this is not a subject touched upon lightly in the scientific world. (this comment is going to have a lot of links, because i'm interested in rocks and minerals. The info may be interesting or, as with the IMA info, useful and particularly relevant, so please bear with me.)
It becomes an issue in the everyday world more than one might expect. For example, i have anAlexandrite ring, a family heirloom. It's gorgeous, it's stunning, and it's a rock rarely seen in the jeweller's.
What's the difference between this and any other cut and polished 'ballistic missile from god'? (thank you, Mr. Watterson, for that beautiful quote.) It's pretty. So people remember it, although most people get it confused with iolite.
Amethyst is just another kind of quartz.
Rocks for which there is no scientific use frequently end up as jewellery, or even bookends, and i guess that's where a lot of the names get dropped. Rhodochrosite becomes 'that pink stone there,' and Calcite becomes (and i do not jest) "Fiberoptic stone," or sometimes "TV stone," or i've even seen it just listed as 'refractive' or 'optical' quartz. (Yeah, i've gotten kicked out of the museum of science gift shop over this one, but they let me back in when i promised to shut up.)
Personally, i think that such uses should involve the chemical composition in the labelling, sonce then people would grow up knowing the difference between nephrite and jadeite, and things labelled 'serpentine' (yes, it also talks about chromium)(see also here)and 'amazonite' would then end up consistently identified. Red ruby would be "ruby- Al2O3" and people would learn to recognise it the way they did the contents of ordinary table salt.
*sigh*
Yeah, i know nobody's going to label Paramelaconite (a tetragonal oxide of copper) for the common consumer... but isn't it a nice thought? For more on the naming of minerals, try and here, and also here, with the International Mineralogical Association.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
I hope you mean it's not significant to you. Current estimates of the energies of large impacts are very crude. It would take the world's entire nuclear arsenal to simulate just one, and the complex nature of large craters (multiple rings, central peaks) means our knowledge of smaller craters doesn't scale up well. The presence of this mineral gives an indication of the pressure and temperature under the impact site, and therefore a guess at the original energy of the explosion.
How's this important? It could tell us what mass and orbital velocity are necessary to make an asteroid an impact threat. If it turns out that even smaller rocks than we thought can create devastating explosions, it means we would probably have to throw a whole lot more money into telescopes to track them. On a related note, Scientific American's Nov. issue has an article on asteroid tugboats.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Here I always thought that someone with a poor background in science just tried adding "-ite" to some cool sounding element just to get something sci-fi sounding.
Make a knife!
For all you D&D/Conan nerds out there...
You can also buy your own meteorite here.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The problem with using chemical names for minerals is that, typically, mineral compositions are so messy. Sure, they start off as a simple e.g. metal silicate or carbonate or sulfide, but then you get all sorts of substitutions thrown in of varying proportions.
Besides, the chemical name doesn't tell the whole story. Allotropes aside (do we really want to call both graphite and diamond just 'carbon'?), trace contaminants and variations in crystal growth make a difference. Quartz is 'just' silicon dioxide -- but 'amethyst', 'citrine', 'rock crystal', and 'cairngorm' distinguish the types (let alone 'agate', 'flint', 'sardonyx', 'jasper' and 'chalcedony', to name just a few kinds of contaminated cryptocrystalline silicon dioxide).
Sure, the names aren't particularly meaningful in themselves, any more than are the names of, say, programming languages (although 'C', 'C++' and 'C#' suggest some similarities -- but 'PERL', 'PL/I' and 'APL' are utterly dissimilar), or any other jargon. But to someone who knows them they encapsulate a lot of information in a single word.
-- Alastair
I fear the future prospectors deliberately crashing meteors into the Earth just to create more of these rare minerals!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
As others have pointed out, this isn't exactly earthshaking news. Now, if people exposed to the meteorite gained the ability to fly or shoot heat rays out of their eyes, that's different.
Chemical names might not be ideal, and it's not necessarily a binary choice between chemical names and the current system. If someone had realized the problem earlier, something more meaningful might have been dreamed up to address the name problem. Realistically proper chemical names might not be the best solution for other reasons; the information a geologist needs about a mineral is often different from, and more limited than, what a pure chemist might be after. There are also a lot more chemical compounds than minerals, so that system is probably overkill.
For example, a big improvement would be some name system that: incorporates something to identify the crystal system; something to hint at whether it's a silicate, oxide, sulfide, carbonate, native element, etc.; if silicate something about the arrangment of silica tetrahedra; and then a name. A few building block could probably be used put together perhaps a pair of words to describe the mineral. It needn't be exotic and cumbersome, nor would it need to precisely define every characteristic of the mineral or its chemical formula. I do not intend to propose a system -- I just want to point out that there isn't necessarily anything to prevent someone from developing a reasonable one.
Such names would give just enough information to relate the name to a few important and relevant, but basic, characteristics of the mineral, and generally make things a little more sane.
The common lapidary names for quartz and microcrytalline quartz, and all sorts of other common gem designations, live in a different world for the most part. They're also not the problem. Pseudoboleite and jimthompsonite are the problem.
inorganic
solid
ordered crystal structure
definite chemical composition
naturally occurring
Quite so - Curiously, ice fits this descriptor - and glaciers qualify as metamorphic rocks, though they have rheidities (a unit of time) that are substantially different from those of most things we consider mineral or rock.
Subduction leads to orogeny
That's 'D-flat'
Potentially profitable for the person on whose property it landed, but it must be shipped off-planet for sale.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.