A team of Canadian researchers claimed to have discovered two new minerals, and potentially a third, after studying a meteorite that crashed in East Africa, reports the guardian.
The meteorite, which is no less than the ninth largest ever recorded on Earth, is two meters wide and was unearthed in Somalia in 2020. A piece of about 70 grams was extracted from it, which is mainly iron, and was sent to the University of Alberta.
It was while classifying the rock that Professor Chris Herd, from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, noticed “unusual” minerals. He then asked the head of the university’s laboratory department to study the meteorite.
“From the first day of analysis, he told me that we had at least two new minerals there,” Chris Herd testified to the guardian.
“It was phenomenal. Most of the time it takes a lot more work and research to say that there is a new mineral.”
Elaliite and Elkinstonite
Minerals similar to those discovered were created synthetically in a laboratory in the 1980s, but have never been recorded in nature. “I could never have imagined that one day I would be involved in describing new minerals simply by studying a piece of meteorite,” Chris Herd confided again.
The two minerals were named elaliite and elkinstonite, in reference to the place where they were found (El Ali in Somalia) and to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a NASA researcher working on a metal-rich asteroid exploration project: (16) Psyche .
“She worked a lot on the formation of the nuclei of the planets, the nuclei of iron and nickel, and the closest element we have is iron meteorites, so it made sense to name a mineral after her,” he explained. Chris Herd.
Therefore, researchers at the University of Alberta want to study other samples of the meteorite, but it is now untraceable and could have been purchased and then transported to China.
Source: BFM TV
