Sci-Tech Information: Purple-Pink Mineral, "Putnisite," Discovered In Australia
A new purple-pink mineral that has a chemical composition and crystalline structure unlike any of the known 4,000 minerals has been discovered at a mining site in Western Australia, researchers report.
Now called putnisite, the mineral was discovered in a surface outcrop of Polar Bear Peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan, north of Norseman. While workers with a mining company were prospecting for nickel and gold, one of them noticed the bright-pink grains and sent the mineral to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and then it was sent to Peter Elliott, a research associate with the South Australian Museum, for examination.
And, sure enough, the crystal was novel.
"A mineral is different from currently known minerals if it has either a different chemical composition or it has a different crystal structure, or sometimes both," Elliott told Live Science in an email. "Occasionally, a new mineral will have a chemistry that is very different to other minerals, or it will have a crystal structure that is very different to other minerals."
Elliott added, "Putnisite, a strontium calcium chromium sulfate carbonate, has both a unique chemical composition and a unique crystal structure." (The color of putnisite crystals ranges from pale to dark purple, with a pink streak, according to the researchers.)
Found on volcanic rock, the new mineral occurs as tiny crystals just 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) in diameter, and looks like spots of dark pink on dark-green-and-white rock; under a microscope, the mineral appears as cubelike crystals.
"When the rocks in the Lake Cowan area were deposited millions of years ago, they contained small concentrations of strontium calcium chromium and sulfur," Elliott said. "Over time, weathering released these elements and concentrated them, allowing putnisite to crystallize."
Though it is not uncommon to find a new mineral €" 50 to 100 such specimens have been discovered in each of the past several years €" they aren't usually discovered by miners, Elliott said.
"Often, they are found in museum mineral collections," he said. "Many new minerals are found by mineral collectors who will forward a specimen they have found to a mineralogist at a museum of [a] university for identification."
The researchers are not sure if the mineral, described in Mineralogy Magazine, has any practical uses. Putnisite gets its name from Australian mineralogists Andrew and Christine Putnis.
CSIRO, Weather bureau deliver dire warming summary
The national weather agency is predicting Australia's climate will continue to warm, bringing more extreme heat and longer fire seasons across large parts of the country.
A new report by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO concludes the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising, and left unchecked further emissions will cause more warming this century.
It says the average temperature in Australia has risen 0.9 degrees from 1910 while since 1970 there has been a 17 per cent decline in average winter rainfall in the southwest of Australia.
This latest BoM report focuses on climate observations and monitoring in the Australian region as well as possible future scenarios.
- Seven of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998, with a five-fold increase in the frequency of very warm months over the same period.
- The report found that since the 1970s there had also been an increase in extreme fire weather, but predicted worse was to come.
- More extreme fire-weather days are slated for southern and eastern Australia, areas devastated by bushfires this spring and summer, with longer fire seasons in these regions to drag on.
- In bad news for farmers, a likely increase in drought frequency and severity is predicted as average rainfall in southern Australia decreases.
- Cyclones are expected to be fewer, but fiercer, while more extremely hot days and fewer cool days remain a reality on the horizon.
The BoM and CSIRO said the record-breaking heatwaves like the kind that swept Australia the past two summers were "very unlikely to have been caused by natural variability alone".
Cutting global emissions would be crucial to preventing the worst global warming has in store, but that alone wouldn't be enough, the science agencies warn.
"Adaptation is required because some warming and associated changes are unavoidable," it recommended.
The reports joins the dots between carbon pollution, climate change, fire and drought, The Climate Institute says.
€This report from the government's primary climate advisers should put an end to the reluctance of our political and business leaders to accept the risks and costs to Australia of inadequate climate action,€ institute chief executive John Connor said.
Looking forward, the report found:
- Further decreases in average rainfall are expected over southern Australia compared with the climate of 1980 to 1999€¦ with largest decreases in winter and spring. Droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe in southern Australia.
- Fire-weather days are projected to grow in southern and eastern Australia; by 10 to 50 per cent for low emissions and 100 to 300 per cent for high emissions, by 2050 compared with the climate of 1980 to 1999.
CSIRO develop new tools to predict bushfire behaviour
With Australia already embroiled in the earliest-starting fire season in memory, it's pertinent that the CSIRO is working on improving our ability to model and predict bushfire behaviour.
This week, the science agency presented a new tool at its Bushfire Behaviour Symposium in Canberra: Amicus, a decision support tool designed to give users access to both a knowledge base of fire behaviour, and 60 years' worth of cumulative refinement of fire behaviour modelling within CSIRO.
As Dr Andrew Sullivan (CSIRO's team leader in the Bushfire Dynamics and Applications Group) explained to Vulture South, fire is simply too complex a beast to fully model or predict inside any computer.
€Fire is a huge and chaotic chemical process€, he said, with parameters that extend €from the micron scale up to the tens of kilometres€. The best science can offer is to simplify this down into models that take a smaller number of inputs - fuel load, windspeed and topography, for example - and predict an expected forward rate of spread of a fire.
The alghorithms are well-known in the fire community: they've been published, they're accessible, and even today, it's relatively easy to apply the models using nothing more than a circular slide rule, which Sullivan noted is €still useful, because it's quite graphical and easy to use €¦ but it's too slow if you have to make lots of predictions€. There also exist a host of spreadsheets implementing bushfire model algorithms, with €varying degrees of success, reliability and support.€
So one of Amicus' aims is to give people access to a consistent set of models and knowledge repositories; another, to make that data available to the modern user who's just as likely to be carrying a smartphone or tablet as using a PC in a control centre.
Another was simply to upgrade CSIRO's previous bushfire modelling software: built back in the days of Windows NT, Sullivan said, it's pretty much obsolete. So his team was able to get the internal funding to rewrite the software, providing an interface to bushfire data and models that works in today's environment.
In the long-term, however, the most important characteristic of Amicus will be the way it enables and encourages users to feed back their real-world experience against the models the software presents.
It's important to identify how the real world experience differs from the predictions of models, Sullivan said. As well as the chaotic complexity of a fire, he noted that there are still many fuel types in Australia for which no model exists.
Amicus users will be encouraged to help €crowd-source€ their real-world experience back into the Nationa
Now called putnisite, the mineral was discovered in a surface outcrop of Polar Bear Peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan, north of Norseman. While workers with a mining company were prospecting for nickel and gold, one of them noticed the bright-pink grains and sent the mineral to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and then it was sent to Peter Elliott, a research associate with the South Australian Museum, for examination.
And, sure enough, the crystal was novel.
"A mineral is different from currently known minerals if it has either a different chemical composition or it has a different crystal structure, or sometimes both," Elliott told Live Science in an email. "Occasionally, a new mineral will have a chemistry that is very different to other minerals, or it will have a crystal structure that is very different to other minerals."
Elliott added, "Putnisite, a strontium calcium chromium sulfate carbonate, has both a unique chemical composition and a unique crystal structure." (The color of putnisite crystals ranges from pale to dark purple, with a pink streak, according to the researchers.)
Found on volcanic rock, the new mineral occurs as tiny crystals just 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) in diameter, and looks like spots of dark pink on dark-green-and-white rock; under a microscope, the mineral appears as cubelike crystals.
"When the rocks in the Lake Cowan area were deposited millions of years ago, they contained small concentrations of strontium calcium chromium and sulfur," Elliott said. "Over time, weathering released these elements and concentrated them, allowing putnisite to crystallize."
Though it is not uncommon to find a new mineral €" 50 to 100 such specimens have been discovered in each of the past several years €" they aren't usually discovered by miners, Elliott said.
"Often, they are found in museum mineral collections," he said. "Many new minerals are found by mineral collectors who will forward a specimen they have found to a mineralogist at a museum of [a] university for identification."
The researchers are not sure if the mineral, described in Mineralogy Magazine, has any practical uses. Putnisite gets its name from Australian mineralogists Andrew and Christine Putnis.
CSIRO, Weather bureau deliver dire warming summary
The national weather agency is predicting Australia's climate will continue to warm, bringing more extreme heat and longer fire seasons across large parts of the country.
A new report by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO concludes the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising, and left unchecked further emissions will cause more warming this century.
It says the average temperature in Australia has risen 0.9 degrees from 1910 while since 1970 there has been a 17 per cent decline in average winter rainfall in the southwest of Australia.
This latest BoM report focuses on climate observations and monitoring in the Australian region as well as possible future scenarios.
- Seven of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998, with a five-fold increase in the frequency of very warm months over the same period.
- The report found that since the 1970s there had also been an increase in extreme fire weather, but predicted worse was to come.
- More extreme fire-weather days are slated for southern and eastern Australia, areas devastated by bushfires this spring and summer, with longer fire seasons in these regions to drag on.
- In bad news for farmers, a likely increase in drought frequency and severity is predicted as average rainfall in southern Australia decreases.
- Cyclones are expected to be fewer, but fiercer, while more extremely hot days and fewer cool days remain a reality on the horizon.
The BoM and CSIRO said the record-breaking heatwaves like the kind that swept Australia the past two summers were "very unlikely to have been caused by natural variability alone".
Cutting global emissions would be crucial to preventing the worst global warming has in store, but that alone wouldn't be enough, the science agencies warn.
"Adaptation is required because some warming and associated changes are unavoidable," it recommended.
The reports joins the dots between carbon pollution, climate change, fire and drought, The Climate Institute says.
€This report from the government's primary climate advisers should put an end to the reluctance of our political and business leaders to accept the risks and costs to Australia of inadequate climate action,€ institute chief executive John Connor said.
Looking forward, the report found:
- Further decreases in average rainfall are expected over southern Australia compared with the climate of 1980 to 1999€¦ with largest decreases in winter and spring. Droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe in southern Australia.
- Fire-weather days are projected to grow in southern and eastern Australia; by 10 to 50 per cent for low emissions and 100 to 300 per cent for high emissions, by 2050 compared with the climate of 1980 to 1999.
CSIRO develop new tools to predict bushfire behaviour
With Australia already embroiled in the earliest-starting fire season in memory, it's pertinent that the CSIRO is working on improving our ability to model and predict bushfire behaviour.
This week, the science agency presented a new tool at its Bushfire Behaviour Symposium in Canberra: Amicus, a decision support tool designed to give users access to both a knowledge base of fire behaviour, and 60 years' worth of cumulative refinement of fire behaviour modelling within CSIRO.
As Dr Andrew Sullivan (CSIRO's team leader in the Bushfire Dynamics and Applications Group) explained to Vulture South, fire is simply too complex a beast to fully model or predict inside any computer.
€Fire is a huge and chaotic chemical process€, he said, with parameters that extend €from the micron scale up to the tens of kilometres€. The best science can offer is to simplify this down into models that take a smaller number of inputs - fuel load, windspeed and topography, for example - and predict an expected forward rate of spread of a fire.
The alghorithms are well-known in the fire community: they've been published, they're accessible, and even today, it's relatively easy to apply the models using nothing more than a circular slide rule, which Sullivan noted is €still useful, because it's quite graphical and easy to use €¦ but it's too slow if you have to make lots of predictions€. There also exist a host of spreadsheets implementing bushfire model algorithms, with €varying degrees of success, reliability and support.€
So one of Amicus' aims is to give people access to a consistent set of models and knowledge repositories; another, to make that data available to the modern user who's just as likely to be carrying a smartphone or tablet as using a PC in a control centre.
Another was simply to upgrade CSIRO's previous bushfire modelling software: built back in the days of Windows NT, Sullivan said, it's pretty much obsolete. So his team was able to get the internal funding to rewrite the software, providing an interface to bushfire data and models that works in today's environment.
In the long-term, however, the most important characteristic of Amicus will be the way it enables and encourages users to feed back their real-world experience against the models the software presents.
It's important to identify how the real world experience differs from the predictions of models, Sullivan said. As well as the chaotic complexity of a fire, he noted that there are still many fuel types in Australia for which no model exists.
Amicus users will be encouraged to help €crowd-source€ their real-world experience back into the Nationa