Researchers Uncover Most Complex Mineral on Earth

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Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that the complexity of a uranium-based mineral, dubbed ewingite, is nearly twice as high as the previous most complex mineral. The study, published in Geology, required the use of the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the brightest X-ray source in the Western Hemisphere, to define the mineral’s structure.

According to Peter C. Burns, Henry J. Massman Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at Notre Dame and co-author of the study, structural complexity of minerals can be measured by bits per unit cell. The average is about 228 bits.