[표지로 읽는 과학] Dolomite, abundant in ancient times, but difficult to manufacture in the laboratory

This week’s international academic journal ‘Science’ featured a photo of the rocky mountain ‘Tre Cime di Lavaredo’ located in northeastern Italy on the cover. This rocky mountain with three peaks contains a major carbonate mineral called ‘dolomite’.

Dolomite is a thermodynamically stable carbonate rock, similar to limestone, but has the characteristic of containing equal amounts of calcium and magnesium. It is assumed that the dolomite crystal structure is formed only when calcium and magnesium atoms are arranged in a specific order.

Although this mineral is abundant in ancient sedimentary rocks, it does not form well in modern environments. For this reason, since the last century, scientists have continuously attempted to research how to create this mineral under laboratory conditions. However, manufacturing of minerals failed.

As a result, a new idea that has recently emerged is that the calcium and magnesium atoms in the dolomite structure are probably not arranged in an orderly manner. The explanation is that calcium-magnesium carbonate is formed in a disorderly manner, and then order appears to develop over a long period of time. When the disordered calcium-magnesium precipitate is dissolved and another precipitate is formed through a supersaturated solution, the process of forming a disordered surface is repeated, slowly forming an ordered dolomite layer.

On the 23rd, a research team led by Professor Wenhao Sun of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan announced in Science that to create dolomite, a process of circulating a solution under unsaturated and supersaturated conditions is necessary. He explained that this cycle is an essential process when creating dolomite by speeding up the process of creating calcium-magnesium carbonate crystals by 10 million times. This is consistent with the process of dolomite formation in marine environments where evaporation occurs.

The research team believed that this study would provide basic insight into the process of uncovering what geoscience processes led to the formation of dolomite and research into the rapid production of dolomite.