“The discovery confirms about 50 years of theoretical and experimental work by geophysicists, seismologists and other scientists trying to understand the makeup of the Earth’s interior.”
Well, there it is, more grant money! I bet they were running on empty prior to this “incredible discovery”!
BTW, what does “confirms the theory...” really mean?
“BTW, what does ‘onfirms the theory...’really mean?”
It means the researchers had a number of good reasons to suspect water is incorporated into certain minerals to form new minerals under certain conditions of extreme pressure and heat. When researching a subject in the physical sciences, the researcher progresses from a conjecture to an hypothesis and then to a theory. Unfortunately, the word, theory, is all to often used in the wrong context when the correct word to use is an hypothesis. A conjecture is the first step by asking the question of whether an experiment may or may not demonstrate the existence of a proposed physical phenomenom. An hypothesis is the second step where an experiment is proposed to demonstrate the existence of a proposed physical phenomenom. A theory is the third step where enough hypotheses have been proposed, experimentally tested, and found to be true to make a provisional acceptance of the hypotheses to be generally true until such time the experimental testing of future hypotheses falsifies the previous hypotheses with new and more correct experimental results.
In the case of this mineral, the researchers had extraterrestrial samples of the water bearing mineral, but they had not yet discovered any terrestrial samples to compare with the extraterrestrial samples. This newly discovered terrestrial sample of the mineral was fortuitously incorporated as an inclusion in a diamond formed at the bottom of the continenatl plate and was transported within the diamond to the Earth’s surface by a volcanic eruption. Under different circumstances the mineral would likely have been dehydrated and transformed into a different mineral before it could reach the Earth’s surface, but the crystalline lattice of the diamond prevented the transformation of the mineral in this instance.
Having access to this mineral has finally confirmed the hypothesis and/or theory that such a mineral should exist in the Earth’s mantle. The basis for the hypothesis and/or theory before this discovery was the presence of the mineral in the extraterrestrial rocks contained in the asteroidal-meteoric rocks falling on the earth’s surface and the high pressure and high heat experiments in the laboratories. Having reason to suspect the mineral should be in the mantle because of the physical properties found outside the mantle was one thing, and discovering an actual sample of the mineral from the mantle was the experimental evidence it actually exists in the Earth’s mantle.