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There Is Only One Specimen Of The Rarest Mineral On Earth - IFLScience

There Is Only One Specimen Of The Rarest Mineral On Earth - IFLScience

There Is Only One Specimen Of The Rarest Mineral On Earth - IFLScience
Jan 26, 2023 56 secs

After all, we live on a large planet, and if geologic forces produce a particular mineral in one spot, there’s a pretty good chance they will make it somewhere else as well.

An almost identical synthetic compound was already known, so if you badly want some, you don’t need to steal the single specimen from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where it is stored.

Bismuth is such a heavy element the density of kyawthuite is more than eight times that of water (and double that of the rubies it slightly resembles), so the stone is even smaller than its weight would suggest.

Caltech’s mineral database describes the structure as having checkerboard sheets of octahedra Sb 5+ O 6 parallel to Bi 3+ atoms.

Speaking to LiveScience, Caltech Professor George Rossman attributed the abundance of gemstones in Myanmar to the pressure and heat produced when India collided with Asia.

Although having so many types of gems puts Myanmar in the running to have the two rarest minerals, decades of war and international sanctions make it likely a lot of examples of each are not reaching scientists.

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