Earth Sciences
Diamond-making techniques have been embraced by Earth scientists in their efforts to simulate conditions in the Earth's deep interior. Of special significance were the high-pressure syntheses of two new forms of silicates. In 1960 Sergei Stishov, while at the Institute of High-Pressure Physics in Moscow, subjected ordinary beach sand (composed of the mineral quartz SiO2) to more than 8 GPa of pressure and high temperatures. The form of silica that he produced was approximately 62 percent denser than quartz and was the first known high-pressure compound to contain silicon in six-coordination rather than the four-coordination found in virtually all crustal minerals. The natural occurrence of this new synthetic material was confirmed within a few weeks by careful examination of shocked material from Meteor Crater, Ariz., U.S. The mineral was named stishovite.
In 1974 a second high-pressure discovery revolutionized geologists' understanding of deep-earth mineralogy when Lin-gun Liu of the Australian National University used a diamond-anvil cell to synthesize silicate perovskite, a dense form of the common mineral enstatite, MgSiO3. Subsequent studies by Liu revealed that many of the minerals believed to constitute the deep interior of the Earth transform to the perovskite structure at lower mantle conditions—an observation that led him to propose that silicate perovskite is the Earth's most abundant mineral, perhaps accounting for more than half of the planet's volume.
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