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Scientists Have Finally Sampled the Most Abundant Material On Earth
rossgneumann writes: The most abundant material on Earth didn't have a name, and, in fact, hadn't been seen — until now. For the first time ever, scientists have gotten their hands on a sample of bridgmanite, a mineral that is believed to make up more than a third of the volume of the Earth. In a new paper published in Science late last week, Oliver Tschauner of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his team describe bridgmanite for the first time.
some info not in the summary or article:
Formula: (Mg,Fe)SiO3
System: Orthorhombic
Name:
Named in 2014 by Chi Ma and Oliver Tschauner in honor of Percy Williams Bridgman [April 21, 1882 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA - August 20, 1961 Randolph, New Hampshire, USA], winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1946 for his work in high-pressure physics.
Technically, it's not "on Earth", it's "in Earth".
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Unobtainium has been obtained? Now it's "Misnamedium".
Table-ized A.I.
Compared to the volume of the rest of the planet, much of it consisting of, you guessed it, bridgmanite, water is a very thin film on the surface....water is about 0.02% of the total earths' mass
actually the total amount of water would only cover the entire surface with a uniform layer one fifteenth of one percent the total radius of the planet. Water is in fact, therefore, pretty scarce on Earth.
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It is to the Vogons.
I thought stupidity was the most abundant material on earth.
Water is in fact, therefore, pretty scarce on Earth.
That's like arguing the material a balloon is made of is scarce on a balloon. Its true that there's not much of it in the total volume of a balloon. But it still makes up pretty much 100% of the surface area ON a balloon.
Similarly bridgmanite is pretty rare on the surface, even if it is the most common by far when you start looking further down.
We wrote some poems about it.
Is it green? Ode to a lump of green putty I found in my armpit one midsummer's morning.
Water is in fact, therefore, pretty scarce on Earth.
That's like arguing the material a balloon is made of is scarce on a balloon. Its true that there's not much of it in the total volume of a balloon. But it still makes up pretty much 100% of the surface area ON a balloon.
...
Two strikes for you - first you make a poor analogy (In a completely deflated state the rubber is the entire volume and mass of the balloon), and second you missed the opportunity to make it a car analogy.
A better analogy would be that paint (or enamel) is pretty scarce on a car since such a tiny fraction of its total mass consists of paint, even though us "surfacists" consider the paint a very important characteristic of the car.
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No, just on reddit.
Yes, that is the sound of a fast moving electric car!
I was thinking along the lines of: females are plentiful, but for a lot of slashdotters they're completely inaccessible.
The obvious and accpted name should be, Alotofite
Or the sound of a deflating balloon
Actually, TFA links to an earlier article that discusses a sample of ringwoodite (the transition layer material between upper and lower mantles) that had water trapped inside it. The whole thing was encased by a diamond that emerged in Brazil. They claim that it "confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth’s mantle." The ringwoodite sample was 1.5% water by weight, so water is still a small percentage of Earth's mass, but there is more than just surface water.