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."

Comments

Re:Mineral Names (Chemists Learned From Geologists

[barakn]

I'm really not sure that this is very significant news.

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.