The Barringer meteor crater is an iconic Arizona landmark, more than 1km wide and 170 metres deep, left behind by a massive 300,000 tonne meteorite that hit Earth 50,000 years ago with a force equivalent to a ten megaton nuclear bomb. The forces unleashed by such an impact are hard to comprehend, but a team …[Read More]
I am sitting in a hot lecture theatre in the Università deli Studi, Florence, two days before the start of the proper business of Goldschmidt 2013, a meeting of thousands of geochemists from across the globe. Before discussions of the latest news and views in the geochemical world, a number of pre-conference workshops and short …[Read More]
Magnesium silicate perovskite is the most abundant silicate in our planet. Never given a mineral name in its own right, it is unstable at Earth’s surface and has only been observed directly in the lab, rather than the field. So it fails to meet the criteria set down by the masters of mineral names, the …[Read More]
