Davemaoite is the never-before-seen mineral found trapped in a diamond

A team of scientists has discovered a mineral, never before seen, trapped in a diamond mined from the depths of the Earth’s surface, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

The Researchers named the mineral davemaoite after prominent geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao. It is the first example found of a high pressure calcium silicate perovskite (CASiO3).

Davemaoite has a crystalline structure that only forms at high pressure and temperature. These conditions occur in the terrestrial mantle, which it lies between the crust and the core of the Earth.

The existence of this mineral was known

For this reason, scientists already suspected that this mineral probably existed in the mantle. However, they had never found direct evidence of its existence: the mineral decomposes into other minerals when it moves towards the surface and the pressure decreases, they reported. Live Science.

So to find a natural sample, scientists believed, you would have to drill miles deep under the ocean floor. An impossible task.

Before discovery, researchers had succeeded in synthesizing the mineral in a laboratory using a high pressure environment, but its chemical structure was immediately rearranged once the mineral was removed from 20 gigapascals of pressure.

The Botswana diamond

Now, the analysis of a diamond mined more than 30 years ago in Botswana, which formed in the mantle about 660 kilometers below the earth’s surface, has revealed a sample of intact davemaoite trapped within in the form of small black scales embedded in the diamond.

As a result, the International Mineralogical Association has confirmed that davemaoite is a new mineral, according to Live Science.

“We thought the chances of finding it were so low that we never actively looked for it,” he explains to Scientific American lead author Oliver Tschauner, a mineralogist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Tschauner and his colleagues discovered the davemaoite sample with a technique known as synchrotron X-ray diffraction, revealing the chemical makeup of the specks, which they concluded was a mineral new to science that originated several hundred kilometers deep in the upper limit of the lower mantle.

“Tschauner’s work [y sus colaboradores] inspires hope in the discovery of other difficult high pressure phases in nature ”, Yingwei Fe, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, writes in a commentary on the study. “This direct sampling of the inaccessible lower mantle would fill our knowledge gap about the chemical composition of the entire mantle of our planet.” (I)