Teaching Petrology in the 21st Century

Topical Resources

Call it mineral physics, mineral sciences or whatever you will - the discovery that much of the earth is made up of wadsleyite, ringwoodite and perovskite is the simple result of experimental mineralogy, with good old fashioned tools of Xrays and spectroscopy. When Ringwood, Major, Lin gun Liu or Jeanloz started their careers, "mineral physics" did not exist.

Sumit,
The mineral deep in the earth is not perovskite of course. That is a phase with the formula CaTiO3 (it is further complicated by having several related structures). By the way there is no such thing as magnesiowustite either (or ferropericlase), it is just periclase (or if one has > 10 mol % Fe, ferroan periclase is an option.). Using magnesiowustite or ferropericlase is rather like the terms sodioanorthite, calcioalbite or titanostishovite. A little known fact to many mineral physicists is that periclase is also stable at low pressure (even if it is ferroan), occurring in marbles from contact aureoles and rarely in magnesian carbonatites. If mineral physicists really want to communicate with mineralogists and petrologists they should use correct mineral names when they are available.
Eric