There's a new mineral in town. Meet "putnisite," a unique mineral found in a surface outcrop at Polar Bear peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan in Western Australia.
Discovered during prospecting by a mining company in Australia and handed on to Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation for initial research, putnisite reinforced its identity in the hands of the University of Adelaide mineralogy researcher Peter Elliot and his team after they did a detailed analysis.
What makes putnisite stand out from the world's known 4,000 minerals is its very unusual combination of strontium, calcium, chromium, sulphur, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen elements, forming a rather extensive and distinctive formula SrCa4Cr83+(CO3)8SO4(OH)16•25H2O.
"Most minerals belong to a family or small group of related minerals, or if they aren't related to other minerals they often are to a synthetic compound -- but putnisite is completely unique and unrelated to anything," Elliot said in a press release.
Despite the scientific breakthrough, scientists have yet to find out the practical uses of the mineral, which usually forms in volcanic rocks and hardens into tiny crystals that grow no more than 0.5mm in diameter.
Putnisite is a brittle, translucent, orthorombic crystalline structure, with pink streaks marbled in dark green and white rock, which appears as square, cube-like crystals under the microscope. In terms of hardness, it can be akin to gypsum, which is second to talc in Moh's scale of hardness. Talc is the softest mineral.
"What defines a mineral is its chemistry and crystallography," Elliot explained. "By X-raying a single crystal of mineral you are able to determine its crystal structure and this, in conjunction with chemical analysis, tells you everything you need to know about the mineral."
Elliot, who is responsible for the discovery of 12 new Australian minerals in the past seven years, is also a visiting research fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and a research associate in the South Australian Museum.
"Nature seems to be far cleverer at dreaming up new chemicals than any researcher in the laboratory," he concluded.
This newfound mineral was named after Christine and Andrew Putnis from the University of Münster in Germany, who are both respected and recognized for their significant contributions in the field of mineralogy.
The study appears in Mineralogical Magazine, an international journal of mineral sciences covering topics on mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry, petrology, environmental geology and economic geology. It is published six times a year.
