In the bowels of the Earth, many valuable minerals are stored, the most common of which are gold, crystals and diamonds. But, which is the rarest mineral?
The rarest mineral on Earth turned out to be found in Myanmar. It is called kyawthuite, a 1.61-carat dark orange gemstone found in Myanmar's Mogok region. Little information is known about kyawthuite. So, it is difficult to lay out the ins and outs of kyawthuite.
While the second rarest mineral is painite, hexagonal crystals are dark red in color whose chemical structure remains a mystery. In 1952, a British gem collector, Arthur Pain, obtained two red crystals in Myanmar. This was revealed by George Rossman, professor of minerals at CalTech, who has been researching painite since the 1980s.
At first Pain thought that the dark red stone he got was the famous ruby in Myanmar. But upon further investigation, the stone is much rarer than previously thought, namely painite.
Painite itself is sometimes found along with rubies and other gems. This is why Pain thought it was a ruby and donated it to the British Museum in 1954 for further study. Another painite sample was again found in Myanmar from 1979 to 2001. Currently, a total of three painite have been discovered and are the only known painite specimens in the world.
The first painite discovered was known as painite #1. The stone was analyzed by Rossman. A recent study of painite was published in Mineralogy Magazine in 2018.
"I did a study from the first sample," Rossman was quoted as saying by Live Science. "The results I researched became the standard used to confirm painite discoveries in the future."
Through this study, Rossman managed to determine what elements make up painite, including aluminum, boron, calcium, and oxygen, while the zirconium elements were lost. Another fact that Rossman discovered was the element that gave painite a reddish hue; These are traces of vanadium and chromium that might make it look like a pomegranate smell.
But what makes painite so rare? First, painite is found only in Myanmar. Painite is a boric crystal, meaning it contains boron. Painite also contains zirconium. Boron and zirconium found in one mineral are something very rare.
"As far as I know, no one has done any serious studies on what makes up painite," Rossman said.
Why Myanmar?
It has something to do with natural history. According to Rossman, when the ancient supercontinent Gondwana began to split about 180 million years ago, the Indian region moved north and collided with what is now South Asia.
The pressure and heat from the impact formed a treasure trove of rocks, many of them gemstones. Rossman suspects that boron in painite and borate minerals come from the shallow sea around the newly formed land.
Painite stone is very suitable as luxury jewelry at a fantastic price, reaching 60,000 US dollars per carat or equivalent to Rp. 937 million (exchange rate of Rp. 15,630). If the painite stone alone costs exorbitantly, how about the kyawthuite stone that only exists in the world? It must be really expensive.