Earth's Rarest Minerals Give Diamonds A Run For Their Money

Marilyn Monroe, who famously said, "Diamonds are a girl's best friend," probably hadn't heard of Sardinian ichnusaite. Ichnusaite, a pearly, colorless and brittle mineral, was discovered on the Italian island of Sardinia in 2013. Mineralogist Robert Hazen says that with only one known specimen, it's a true rarity. "If you wanted to give your fiancé a really rare ring, forget diamond. Give her Sardinian ichnusaite," said Hazen, co-author of a new paper categorizing Earth's rarest minerals. Or maybe go with cobaltomenite, a pink-red mineral found in just four locations -- Utah, Argentina, Bolivia and Congo. As the Los Angeles Times reports, cobaltomenite is so rare that the Earth's supply could fit in a shot glass. In a study to be published in American Mineralogist, Hazen, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, and Jesse Ausubel, a scientist at The Rockefeller University, inventoried and categorized more than 2,500 minerals -- the rarest of the rare. Each comes from five or fewer known sites worldwide, and several have a known supply smaller than a sugar cube. "These 2,550 minerals are far more rare than pricey diamonds and gems usually presented as tokens of love," the authors wrote in a statement. But there's one major problem for those thinking of putting the rare minerals on a wedding band. "Several are prone to melt, evaporate or dehydrate," the authors said. "And a few, vampire-like, gradually decompose on exposure to sunligh...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news