Mineral that fills Earth’s lower mantle named for Percy Bridgman

New Scientist : Earth’s lower mantle is composed primarily of a crystalline form of magnesium iron silicate. Until Oliver Tschauner at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and his colleagues examined a 125-year-old Australian meteorite, no examples of the mineral had ever been found in nature. To have formed the mineral, the meteorite must have experienced a temperature of 2000 °C and a pressure of 24 GPa, presumably from a violent impact. The meteorite also had to cool extremely quickly for the crystals to freeze in place—they would have changed shape if the material cooled slowly. The crystals that Tschauner’s team found are only 40 nm to 200 nm long. They decided to name the crystals after Percy Bridgman, a 20th-century physicist who received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on understanding materials at high pressures.