It was called selenojunoite.
Scientists have discovered a new mineral on the territory of the Srednyaya Padma deposit in the Medvejyegorsk region of Karelia; it is called selenojunoite, reports the press service of the Karelian RAS Research Center.
“A new mineral has been discovered in the Zaonezhsky Peninsula of Karelia. A similar mineral species – junoite – is known from discoveries in Australia, but the Karelian analogue contains selenium and received the international name – selenojunoit“, the report says.
The co-author of the discovery was Oleg Lavrov, a researcher at the Museum of Precambrian Geology at the Institute of Geology of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. To ensure that the find in Srednaya Padma is unique, mineralogists had to conduct several studies, including X-ray structural analysis.
As a result, the mineral received the name selenojunoite (Cu2Pb3Bi8(Se,S)16). An international commission approved it as a new mineral species. Selenojunoite is the 14th mineral discovered in Karelia.
The selenojunoite discovered in Karelia can serve as an indicator of deposits of rare and valuable metals that geologists are likely to discover, said Pavel Plechov, Director of the AE Fersman Mineralogical Museum and professor of the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University.
Selenojunoite was discovered at the Srednyaya Padma uranium-vanadium deposit on the Zaonezhsky Peninsula, in a remote region of Karelia, and was approved as a new mineral by the New Minerals Commission of the International Mineralogical Association. Science knew the mineral junoite, which contains a large amount of sulfur, but the selenoid junoite contains selenium instead of sulfur.
“Any new mineral deposit contains mineral diversity. And the minerals identified on it are indicators of the geological conditions in which this deposit was formed. In the future, if such a mineral is found, a new deposit can be found after it. Selenojunoite can become an indicator of many rare metalsPlechov said.
As the scientist explained, there have been several expeditions to the middle Padma region since the 1970s. The last expeditions, already from the 2020s, were organized by the Fersman Mineralogical Museum with the participation of colleagues from the Karelian Scientific Center (KarSC) . The main role in the discovery, as Plechov noted, belonged to the museum's chief researcher, Viktor Gekimyants; KarRC researcher Oleg Lavrov actively participated. The scientists took with them samples from the collection of the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University, as well as the collection of the now deceased veteran of the Faculty of Geology of St. Petersburg State University, Yuri Polekhovsky.
Selenojunoite itself is a dark steel-gray mineral found as irregularly shaped inclusions. As for its properties, as explained by Professor Plechov, it is too early to judge which of them will be useful. “A new mineral is studied for several years, this process is far from fast. In science, there are cases when a mineral was discovered that in itself did not bring practical benefits, but then it turned out to have some unusual properties. And if it is rare in itself, by analogy with it, synthetic materials with the same properties are manufactured“said the scientist.
The Fersman Mineralogical Museum, as Plechov recalled, is the leading organization in the world in the discovery of new minerals – its employees discover about 20 minerals a year, which is about 20% of the newly discovered minerals in the world.
