Guangzhou. The name of the newly discovered mineral is ‘hemleyite’ and the Earth could be full of it, but researchers have found it in a meteorite. The discovery was made by Luca Bindi docent in the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Florence and colleagues from the Guangxhou Institute of Geochemistry and the Accademia Cinese delle Scienze (Chinese Science Academy). It was presented in an article published in the latest number of “Nature Scientific Reports” (“Discovery of the Fe-analogue of akimotoite in the shoked Suizhou L6 chondrite”, DOI 10.1038/srep42674). “10% of the earth could be composed of this element but the scientific community had previously only hypothesised its existence calling it unofficially ‘iron and magnesium ilmenite’ so as not to enter the list of already known minerals. The extraordinary thing is that it is potentially one of the most abundant minerals on the earth found in the transition area between the superior and inferior mantle unaccessible to us due to very high pressure and temperatures” explains Bindi, minerology associate. (9colonne)
