Researchers are far from jaded about this jade.

It’s sometimes surprising what we humans don’t know. Take rocks for example. Animals and plants are always moving around and evolving in a state of flux, so it’s not surprising to find new ones here and there, but I would have sworn we’d have had all the rocks bagged and tagged by now.

And yet a research team composed of academics, corporate scientists, and even amateur mineral researchers has managed to come across an entirely new mineral. It’s a variation of jade, or more specifically, the jadeite form of what we call jade, but this rock has a composition unique enough to classify it as a mineral all its own.

Only a very tiny amount of it was discovered in a sample of regular jade from Okayama Prefecture. Pure Jadeite has a chemical composition of NaAlSi2O6, but this new mineral is made up of Sr4Ti6Si4O23(OH)Cl, which includes significant amounts of strontium and titanium.

▼ This photo shows a section of jade (the white part) only two millimeters wide. Only the very small green parts are the newly discovered mineral.

It was named Amaterasuite (“ah-mah-terra-soo-ite”) after the Japanese creation goddess Amaterasu. Part of the reason for the naming is that jade has long been an important mineral in Japan throughout history, and was even declared the National Stone by the Japan Association of Mineralogical Sciences in 2016. It only seems fitting to name a version of jade after the main goddess of the Shinto religion in that way.

But there’s actually another, more important reason for the name. Many gods in Shinto are said to exist in a duality called aratama and nigitama, where the former is the raging form of the god and the latter is the peaceful form. The aratama and nigitama are one and the same god, but are never seen in the same place at the same time, kind of like two heads of the same coin.

Meanwhile, minerals always have a uniform crystalline chemical arrangement, much in the way that diamond and graphite are both just carbon but differ in the way the atoms are uniformly arranged throughout. Amaterasuite, however, has two atomic arrangements existing in the same mineral but never in the same place at the same time.

▼ Diagram showing the dual structure (Type A and Type B) of Amaterasuite

This type of crystalline structure has been theorized before, but Amaterasuite is the first time such a structure has ever been found in nature. This not only bridges the gap between theoretical and observed mineralogy, but it provides some more insight into the conditions that cause jade to form.

Speaking of which, jade is created when the same subduction of tectonic plates that causes so many earthquakes in Japan makes small cracks in the Earth’s crust. Chemicals from that part of the ocean seep into the cracks and, with the unique combination of low temperatures and high pressures, form into jade. The unique composition of Amaterasuite suggests that more complex reactions might be occurring in this process than previously thought.

This also marks the second recent scientific discovery to be named after Amaterasu. We can assume zoologists in Japan are chomping at the bit to find a new species of wolf they can name after her too.

Source: The Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo, Yomiuri Shimbun Online, My Game News Flash
Featured image: Wikipedia/Utagawa Kunisada
Insert images: The Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo
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