Latest Olivine Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Geoengineering is a controversial and illegal practice that attempts to mitigate the forces of climate change on a grand scale. Many see this attempt to alter global climate via artificial means as a ‘quick fix’ with potential long-term negative effects. However, despite the contentious nature of geoengineering, scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany decided to analyze a ‘rock dissolving’...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Some meteorites found on Earth contain strikingly beautiful, translucent, olive-green crystals embedded in an iron-nickel matrix. These "space gems," called pallasites, are only found in a tiny fraction of the total number of meteorites, but they have fascinated scientists since they were first identified as originating in outer space more than 200 years ago. A new study, published in the journal Science and led by John Tarduno at...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory has discovered pristine material that matches comets in our own Solar System in a dust belt around the young star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris is 12 million years old, and resides a short 63 light-years from Earth. A gas giant planet and a dusty debris disc that has the potential to evolve into a torus of icy bodies like those of the Kuiper Belt found outside the orbit of...

A team of scientists from Oregon has collected microbes from ice within a lava tube in the Cascade Mountains and found that they thrive in cold, Mars-like conditions. The microbes tolerate temperatures near freezing and low levels of oxygen, and they can grow in the absence of organic food. Under these conditions their metabolism is driven by the oxidation of iron from olivine, a common volcanic mineral found in the rocks of the lava tube. These factors make the microbes capable of living...

[ Watch the Video ] WUSTL geochemist helps analyze rare and beautiful meteorite found by a Missouri farmer Last January two amateur meteorite hunters dropped by Randy Korotev’s office at Washington University in St. Louis to show him their latest purchase, a 17-kilogram pallasite meteorite found in 2006 near Conception Junction (population 202) in northwest Missouri. Korotev, research professor in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and an expert in lunar...

Tiny crystals of a green mineral called olivine are falling down like rain on a burgeoning star, according to observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.This is the first time such crystals have been observed in the dusty clouds of gas that collapse around forming stars. Astronomers are still debating how the crystals got there, but the most likely culprits are jets of gas blasting away from the embryonic star."You need temperatures as hot as lava to make these crystals," said...

Earth today is one of the most active planets in the Solar System, and was probably even more so during the early stages of its life. Thanks to the plate tectonics that continue to shape our planet's surface, remnants of crust from Earth's formative years are rare, but not impossible to find. A paper published in Nature Sept. 2 examines how some ancient rocks have resisted being recycled into Earth's convecting interior.Throughout the world there exist regions of ancient crust, referred to as...

HOUSTON, Sept. 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Why do we still find rocks from the Archean, one of the earliest geological eons on Earth dating from about 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago? This is an apt question as our planet is one of the most dynamic in the solar system. Earth's crust has been constantly destroyed and created throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)...

The Moon's geological past could be better understood by a mineral that Japanese astronomers report they have found. Using an instrument-loaded probe - Kaguya - placed in orbit around the lunar body in 2007, the team of scientists found abundant sources of the mineral in concentric rings in three distinct crater regions. Olivine, as the mineral is known, is believed to be a revealing sign of mantle -- the deep inner layer of iron- and magnesium-rich rock that lies beneath the Moon's crust....

Mars is a rocky planet with an ancient volcanic past, but new findings show the planet is more complex and active than previously believed "“ at least in certain places. Finding those places, however, turns out to be trickier than just looking at landforms like river valleys or lakebeds or searching for specific minerals. "Context is everything," said Philip Christensen, Principal Investigator for the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on Mars Global Surveyor and for the Thermal...