Lapatilla
BBC World
In a strange corner of our solar system there are two amorphous alien masses. They are the size of continents, and it is believed that they spend their time waiting for sustenance to fall on them, which they then simply absorb. Its natural habitat is even more unusual than its diet. It could be described as “rocky”: all around it are exotic minerals in unknown shades and shapes. It is otherwise fairly barren, except for a glittering sea in the distance, so vast that it contains as much water as all the oceans on Earth put together.
For The nation
Every day the “weather” is the same: a balmy 1,827°C, and its pressure in some areas is equivalent to about 1.3 million times that of the Earth’s surface. In this crushing environment, atoms warp and even the most familiar materials begin to behave eccentrically: rock is flexible like plastic, while oxygen behaves like metal.
But this scorching hot spot isn’t on an alien planet, and those masses aren’t strictly wildlife. It’s actually on Earth, just deep inside.
In that strange world
The environment in question is the lower mantle, the layer of rock that sits just above the planet’s core. That mostly solid mantle is another world, a swirling place dotted with a kaleidoscope of crystals, from diamonds (of which there are about a quadrillion tons) to minerals so rare they don’t exist on Earth. planet surface.
In fact, the most abundant rocks in this layer, bridgmanite and davemaoite, are largely a mystery to scientists. They need the ultra-high pressures unique to the interior of the planet to develop and will fall apart if brought into our realm.
We can only see them in their natural form when they are trapped inside the diamonds that reach the surface. And even then, it’s impossible to know what they actually look like inside the Earth, as their physical properties are so different at the pressures they normally exist under.
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