Photos and tests from the Mars Rover show an abundance of hematite, a dark red mineral that takes its name from the Greek word haima, meaning “blood.” Another mineral, goethite, is named for the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, an amateur geologist whose collection of 18,000 minerals was famous throughout Europe. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hematite”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I’ve been so taken with the photos sent back to us by the Mars rover Curiosity.
Don’t you love them, Grant?
Mm-Yeah, beautiful stuff. Looks like Southern California.
It does. It does.
And some of those images make you feel like you’re standing right there on the surface.
And the fact that it’s real, that it’s actually coming from another planet, I mean, it’s almost beyond comprehension.
And when I imagine walking around on Mars, I end up following my own curiosity, which, of course, as you know, involves language.
For one thing, if you’re walking around that planet, you’re going to see a lot of something called hematite.
And that’s a dark red mineral.
The word hematite derives from the Greek word heima, or blood.
And so hematite shares a root with hemoglobin and even anhemia anemia, which literally means without blood.
On Mars, you’d also find a lot of a mineral called Gertite.
Now, this is red, yellow, or brown, and it’s the mineral that got NASA all excited when it was discovered on Mars in 2004 because Gertite can’t form without water.
So that discovery raised hopes of finding liquid water, or at least evidence that it existed there at one time.
And Gertite is spelled G-O-E-T-H-I-T-E.
And when I first saw that word, Grant, I thought, well, that looks like Goethe, the name of the German poet.
Is there a connection there?
And it turns out that there is, because by the time Goethe was 25, he was already this big literary celebrity.
This would have been around 1774.
But he was also intensely interested in science and in particular geology.
And it turns out that he was so passionate about minerals that he collected more than 18,000 of them.
He had this massive mineral collection that was just legendary throughout Europe.
And so in 1806, mineralogists named that substance girtite in his honor.
And to me, there’s something about looking at those eerie pictures from the Martian terrain and knowing that it’s full of a mineral named for a poet.
And not just any poet, but the poet who once observed, everything is simpler than one can imagine and yet complicated and intertwined beyond comprehension.
Beautiful.
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