Carbon Mineral Challenge Adds 30 New Carbon Minerals

25 June 2019

The Carbon Mineral Challenge will officially end in September 2019, but this first-of-its-kind worldwide collaboration to identify new carbon minerals has seen an impressive haul. Since its launch in 2015, researchers and mineral collectors have identified 30 new carbon-containing minerals. This is an impressive accomplishment, and yet the diversity of new minerals discovered suggests that many more remain to be found.
 
DCO Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community member Daniel Hummer (Southern Illinois University, USA) sums up the accomplishments of the Carbon Mineral Challenge in a new paper [1] in the Australian Journal of Mineralogy. The DCO-sponsored initiative brought together scientists, industry geologists, museum staff, and amateur mineral collectors in a targeted search to identify new carbon minerals. The variety of the finds highlights the incredible diversity of forms that carbon minerals can take, and also shows the utility of using our knowledge of existing minerals to direct the search for the unknown.
 
“There’s a lot out there that we don’t know,” said Hummer. “It helps us to look at the big picture and make predictions about what’s out there so we’ll know exactly what tools to use, and where to search, to make discoveries more efficiently than we have in the past.”
 
Read the full article.

Recently Discovered Minerals