• Question: What is the rarest stone ever found in earth

    Asked by anon-279214 on 2 Feb 2021.
    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 2 Feb 2021:

      I guess the “rarest” is probably the oldest as there can only ever be one “oldest” of anything. Rocks are normally made up of crystals, and sedimentary rocks (like sandstones) are made up of crystals that were eroded from older rocks. The oldest rocks we have on Earth are between 2-3 billion years old, but the oldest crystals are about 4.4 billion years old.

    • Photo: Katie Sieradzan

      Katie Sieradzan answered on 2 Feb 2021:

      The rarest stone (so far!) is something called painite. For many years, only a single piece was found, and this was kept in The British Museum in London. Now, we have a few more pieces of it, but there are still less than 24 in the entire world!

    • Photo: Amal Lavender

      Amal Lavender answered on 2 Feb 2021:

      According to the Guinness world of Records Painite is the world’s rarest stone. It is a very rare borate mineral. It was first found in Myanmar by British mineralogist and gem dealer Arthur C.D. Pain who misidentified it as ruby, until it was discovered as a new gemstone in the 1950s. When it was confirmed as a new mineral species, the mineral was named after him.

    • Photo: Adam Washington

      Adam Washington answered on 4 Feb 2021:

      I’m going to go a slightly different route and say Trinitite, but mostly because I’m going to play with the question a bit. Compared to Painite, I’ll say that Trinitite is more rare because:

      a) Up until July 16th, 1945, there was literally no Trinitite anywhere on in the universe, so it was certainly more rare than Painite, which could be found in London or Myanmar.

      b) Geologists can keep finding more Painite. All of the Trinitite on Earth has already been found. So, with the passage of time, Painite will become more common, but all that can happen to Trinitite is it becomes more rare (with one big exception).

      To explain a little bit, Trinitite is a glass formed when the sand near Alamogordo, New Mexico is exposed to the detonation of a nuclear bomb. That’s why we know that it can only be found new the Trinity nuclear test site and that there isn’t any more of it waiting to be found. Furthermore, unless something incredibly stupid happens, those conditions will never occur again and no new Trinitite will ever be created.

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