Mineral Found In Meteorite Never Seen In Nature Before
Us humans are a curious bunch. We never stop poking, prodding, observing and reporting things. We like to find new stuff and make new things, which is why we have Google and Etsy. But we’re more than Googlers and crafters. We are mathematicians, psychologists and scientists. And it’s the latter group that has brought us this new nugget of interesting info — we’ve just found a mineral in a meteorite never before seen in nature, according to CNN. Here’s the story of a little mineral called Edscottite.
Our story begins in 1951, when the Wedderburn meteorite crash-landed not far from Museums Victoria, in The Land Down Under. Not long after, scientists began slicing open the little fellow to see what sort of bugs and goo would come out. So far, they’ve found nothing you’d see on a Nickelodeon commercial in between episodes of Doug, but they have found some cool stuff. The coolest? Edscottite!
We’ve seen it before, but only in a man-made form. Edscottite is a “phase iron goes through when it’s cooling down from a high temperature, as it’s smelted into steel.” This is the only time we’ve seen it in nature, which is rather surprising.
“We have discovered 500,000 to 600,000 minerals in the lab, but fewer than 6,000 that nature’s done itself,” Stuart Mills, Museums Victoria’s senior curator of geosciences, reported to the Melbourne newspaper The Age.
Great Scott! It's Edscottite!
In other words, we’ve only found about 1 percent of the minerals that we’ve made in labs outside of the lab. It’s kind of like finding a holographic, first edition Charizard at a thrift store, except not even Charizard is as cool as Edscottite, because Charizard isn’t from space.
We don’t know how it was formed, yet, but one theory is that it was “blasted out of the core of another planet,” after a violent collision with another astral body. Thanks for the Edscottite, Planet Xenoschron!
As for the mineral’s cute name, that’s a credit to “The Father of Edscottite,” one Ed R.D. Scott, a “cosmochemist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and pioneering meteorite researcher. He first identified the unique iron carbide in 1971 while studying the meteorite, but technology hadn’t advanced far enough for him to characterize its structure.” This man was dealing in Edscottite before Edscottite was even a thing.
So for all you memelords and Etsy princesses reading this — set down your keyboards, pick up your electron microscopes, and one day you too may have your own rare mineral named after yourself. Then you can meme it up and sell it on Etsy.
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