Discovery of bridgmanite, the most abundant mineral in Earth, in a shocked meteorite
Abstract
Meteorites exposed to high pressures and temperatures during impact-induced shock often contain minerals whose occurrence and stability normally confine them to the deeper portions of Earth's mantle. One exception has been MgSiO_3 in the perovskite structure, which is the most abundant solid phase in Earth. Here we report the discovery of this important phase as a mineral in the Tenham L6 chondrite and approved by the International Mineralogical Association (specimen IMA 2014-017). MgSiO_3-perovskite is now called bridgmanite. The associated phase assemblage constrains peak shock conditions to ~24 gigapascals and 2300 kelvin. The discovery concludes a half century of efforts to find, identify, and characterize a natural specimen of this important mineral.
Additional Information
©2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 30 July 2014; accepted 22 October 2014. The crystallographic information about bridgmanite is available at the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database and American Mineralogist databases and in the supplementary materials. This work was supported by U.W. Department of Energy (DOE) award DESC0006278, NASA grant NNX12AH63G, and NSF grants EAR-1128799, DE-FG02-94ER14466, EAR-0318518, and DMR-0080065. Part of this work was performed at GeoSoilEnviroCARS (Sector 13), Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. GeoSoilEnviroCARS is supported by NSF-EART-1128799 and DE-FG02-94ER14466). The Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is operated by Argonne National Laboratory under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We thank reviewers N. Ross and T. Sharp for their helpful comments.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - 1259369_SupportingFile_SupplementaryMaterials_seq1_v1.csv
Supplemental Material - 1259369_SupportingFile_SupplementaryMaterials_seq2_v1.cif
Supplemental Material - Tschauner.SM.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 52186
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.1259369
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141126-141558657
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DESC0005278
- NASA
- NNX12AH63G
- NSF
- EAR-1128799
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-FG02-94ER14466
- NSF
- EAR-0318518
- NSF
- DMR-0080065
- NSF
- EAR-1128799
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-FG02-94ER14466
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-AC02-06CH11357
- Created
-
2014-11-27Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)