Response to Comment on “Discovery of davemaoite, CaSiO3-perovskite, as a mineral from the lower mantle”


Oliver Tschauner1, Shichun Huang1, Shuying Yang2, Munir Humayun3, Wenjun Liu3, George R. Rossman4


1 Department of Geoscience, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA 2 National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Science,
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32310, USA
3 Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory,
Lemont, IL 60439, USA		 4 Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences  
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA  91125-2500, USA

ABSTRACT

Walter et al. issue a number of critical comments on our report about the discovery of davemaoite to the end that they believe to show that our results do not provide compelling evidence for the presence of davemaoite in the type specimen and that the hosting diamond had formed in the lithosphere. Their claim is based on a misinterpretation of the diffraction data contained in the paper, an insufficient analysis of the compositional data that disregards the three-dimensional distribution of inclusions, and the arbitrary assumption that Earth’s mantle shows no lateral variations in temperature, inconsistent with state-of-the-art assessments of mantle temperature variations and with their own published results.