Earth’s Most Abundant Mineral Finally Gets a Name
Meet bridgmanite, which is found deep beneath the planet's surface.
The most abundant mineral on Earth has just received a name: bridgmanite.
Scientists have known about the mineral for decades but were only able to examine it up close in the past few years. The mineral is normally found deep beneath the surface, but was identified and studied in a meteorite that collided with the Earth 135 years ago.
Formerly known by its chemical name, silicate perovskite (Mg,Fe)SiO3, the mineral was named bridgmanite this month to honor Percy Bridgman, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1946.
The name recognizes Bridgman's "fundamental contributions to high-pressure physics," Chi Ma, a mineralogist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, tells National Geographic.
Ma characterized the material with Oliver Tschauner, an
