I've been aware of (or at least assumed-possible-of) carbon structures harder than 10 on the Mohs scale. I just didn't think it practical to make such in the lab, as artificial diamond is made, cheaper than digging it out of a mine. Now, meet lonsdaleite - which Nyrath Chung has (figuratively) dug out of a mine 4500 million years ago.
That is: the "ureilite" rocks in which such are found once belonged to a dwarf planet that got shattered by a Pallaslike, way back in Hadean times perhaps even before Theia met Gaia. It wasn't Vesta or Mars, most of which survives; it was something else, now a disintegrate. Presumably 'twas carbon-rich - so maybe formed in the 4 AU region, before Jupiter started its grand tack, which tack started all those pinballs down here like the aforementioned Theia.
The implications of finding these slivers of lonsdal[e]ite isn't that those slivers are, themselves, fit to be forged into a Tutankhamun Blade Of Heaven. It's more that they hint at some chemical means of creating these slivers as we hadn't thought of using down here on Earth today. Which means we can make artificial lonsdaleite, which would be good for drilling deeper than we have been drilling and through more-difficult rock. This would be great for fracking of course - also, more importantly, for geothermal, which (at the end) trends more to the igneous.
Be interesting if gemstones could be made, also. I was never keen on diamonds for engagement-rings.
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