Deep below the earth’s surface lies a thick, rocky layer called the mantle, which makes up the majority of our planet’s volume. For decades, scientists have known that most of the lower mantle is a silicate mineral with a perovskite structure that is stable under the high-pressure and high-temperature conditions found in this region. Although synthetic examples of this composition have been well studied, no naturally occurring samples had ever been found in a rock on the earth’s surface. Thanks to the work of two scientists, naturally occurring silicate perovskite has been found in a meteorite, making it eligible for a formal mineral name. The mineral, dubbed bridgmanite, is named in honor of Percy Bridgman, a physicist who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental contributions to high-pressure physics. “The most abundant mineral of the earth now has an official name,” says Chi Ma, a mineralogist and director of the Geological and Planetary Sciences division’s Analytical Facility at Caltech. “This finding fills a vexing gap in the taxonomy of minerals,” adds Oliver Tschauner, an associate research professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who identified the mineral together with Ma. High-pressure and temperature experiments, as well as seismic
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