From the coalfields of northern England to the Arctic snows and the steaming jungles of Brazil, diamond hunter and scholar Graham Pearson has carved a name for himself that now lives on in rock.
Pearson, a mantle geochemist with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has had a new mineral – Grahampearsonite — approved by the International Mineralogical Association.
It recognizes a lifetime of work on diamonds, including his work in Brazil where he and a team made discoveries over a decade ago that helped explain, through deep-mine diamonds the composition and water content of the Earth’s deep mantle.
“The most lasting legacy of our work as scientists is really the data we produce … but those ideas get modified,” Pearson said in a recent interview.
“So if you are lucky enough to have a mineral named after you, that’s not going to change.
“(And) we’re going to run out of new minerals soon. So it’s very humbling to think that one of those minerals found is named after me.”
Grahampearsonite is chemically known as calcium pyrophosphate, which can be found in toothpaste abrasive.
But Grahampearsonite is the real deal — discovered inside a diamond that crystallized at depths greated than 300 kilometres below the Earth’s surface in Brazil’s Juina region.
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It got its official name in December.
“It might be arcane, but it’s really beautiful,” he said, as he points at a diagram of Grahampearsonite, which is made out of calcium and diphosphorus. The diagram shows oxygen flowing between the chemicals.
“Only natural-occurring minerals can be named (after a person),” Pearson said.
And someone has to discover it, put it in a huge amount of work to characterize it, justify its namesake and then get it approved by the International Mineralogical Association.
“The association decides whether what (researchers have) done is good enough and solid enough to warrant the name of a new mineral,” Pearson said.
Pearson is a trailblazer in diamond research.
In addition to mapping the history of the Earth’s mantle, Pearson has developed new techniques for geochemical analysis and pioneered methods for dating minute geological samples.
Born in the United Kingdom, he was brought up in an English mining town called Pontefract. “I’ve been surrounded by the products of mining,” he said.
And similar to the formation of diamonds, he said his love for the mineral was also a slow burn. His PhD adviser, who was researching a rare graphite mineral from Morocco that used to be a diamond, piqued his interest.
“That got me into the world of diamonds and studying the deep Earth,” he said.
In 2010, he moved to Canada to work for the University of Alberta. He established the world-class Arctic Resources Geochemistry Laboratory.
He continues to research minerals and diamonds in the Arctic.
He said ongoing mineral discovery is important.
“It’s hard to predict what applications some of these synthetic minerals have until you discover them,” he said.
“And I’m a natural scientist and something made synthetically just does not hold the same allure. All the story it tells is that someone put these elements together in a lab and cooked them.”
He said most people like the appearance of diamonds because they sparkle, but said there’s a lot more to them.
“It’s capable of trapping residual pressures inside it that no other mineral is capable of doing,” he said. “That’s what gives it the ability to retain these pieces of the deep Earth … Those elements are also able to tell us amazing things about plate tectonic cycles.”
He said advancement in microscope technology has also made it easier to identify new minerals and humanity will eventually discovered all the minerals Earth has to offer.
We’re about halfway there.
“About 4,800 minerals have been discovered,” he said.
“There’s about another 4,000 probably waiting to be discovered.”
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