News & Comment

摘要

Chris J Stanley, (Natural History Museum) writes In March 2006, I was asked by a colleague at Rio Tinto plc, a global mining company, to help with the identification of a new mineral found in Serbia. This compound was unlike any of the other thirty-odd new minerals I had previously helped to describe. Nowadays, new minerals generally come in the form of a few grains only visible under a microscope, but this one was white and massive; consisting of several centimetres of drill core (the cylindrical core extracted from diamond drilling used in mineral exploration) and a few bags of fragments. So, I put together a multinational team of experts to determine the chemistry, structure and physical properties of the samples. These characteristics are required for submission to the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification of the International Mineralogical Association, the governing body for the naming of new minerals.