When four natural-fullerene sites were tested side by side, only one delivered

The 2003 four-way comparison

By 2003, the natural-fullerene literature had grown messy. Different teams using different methods, different extraction protocols, and different mass-spectrometry instruments had reported fullerenes from a scattering of natural sites. Some of those reports had been replicated; some had not. Detection limits varied. Background-contamination corrections were not standardised. The field needed a careful comparative study.

A team led by David Mossman of Mount Allison University in Canada, with Russian co-authors including Victor Melezhik of the Geological Survey of Norway and Karelian colleagues, did exactly that. The paper was published in Geology in March 2003: "Testing for fullerenes in geologic materials: Oklo carbonaceous substances, Karelian shungites, and Sudbury Black Tuff" (Geology 31(3):255-258).

The team tested three different naturally carbonaceous geological materials, using a single consistent analytical protocol:

1. The Karelian shungite, the rock identified by Buseck et al. in 1992 as the original natural fullerene reservoir.
2. The Oklo carbonaceous substances from Gabon, the site of the natural nuclear fission reactors that operated for hundreds of thousands of years around 1.7 billion years ago, where unusual carbon-rich material is associated with the reactor zones.
3. The Onaping Black Tuff from the Sudbury impact structure, the same Sudbury that Becker, Poreda, and Bada had analysed in 1996 to find helium-3-bearing fullerenes (covered in a separate thread).

The result

When all three were processed through the same analytical pipeline:

- Of 12 Karelian shungite samples, 3 gave clear fullerene signals. Mossman et al. concluded that fullerenes are present in shungite but at low concentrations, and that detection depends on selecting the right type of shungite (the high-carbon shungite-1 grade is much more likely to yield fullerenes than the lower-grade shungite-3 and shungite-4).

- Of the Oklo carbonaceous samples, the team did not get reliable fullerene signals. The Oklo material has interesting carbon chemistry but, on this test, did not appear to host fullerenes at detectable levels.

- The Sudbury Black Tuff gave fullerene signals, consistent with the earlier Becker et al. 1996 result.

What this added

The 2003 paper did several useful things at once. It confirmed that fullerene yields from natural materials are generally small, even from the headline localities. It standardised the analytical methodology for the field. And it documented that within shungite as a category, the fullerene content varies between samples, with the highest-grade material being far more likely to yield detection.

For shungite specifically, the take-away is that not every rock you find labelled as shungite contains the same fullerene content. The 2-billion-year-old high-carbon shungite-1 from the Karelian deposit is the source of the natural-fullerene yield. Lower-carbon-grade material, even from the same deposit, may not give detectable fullerenes.

This is consistent with what Russian-side researchers including Vladimir Kovalevski and Natalia Rozhkova at the Karelian Research Centre had been saying since the mid-1990s, based on their own structural and chemical characterisation work. The 2003 Mossman paper put the same conclusion in a single-protocol comparative-test framework, in a major Western journal.

The Heymann reply

Mossman et al.'s paper was followed by a published comment in Geology from Dieter Heymann (the same Heymann who had co-authored the 1994 K-T fullerene paper with Smalley). Heymann defended earlier higher-yield fullerene reports and pushed back on some of the methodological choices. The comment-and-reply exchange is part of the natural-fullerene literature's normal scientific give-and-take. It does not change the headline finding, which is that shungite is one of the few natural materials where fullerene detection is reproducible across labs.

Sources

- Mossman DJ, Eigendorf G, Tokaryk D, Gauthier-Lafaye F, Guckert KD, Melezhik V, Farrow CEG 2003, "Testing for fullerenes in geologic materials: Oklo carbonaceous substances, Karelian shungites, Sudbury Black Tuff", Geology 31(3):255-258: pubs.geoscienceworld.org
- Heymann D 2003, comment on Mossman et al., Geology 31(1):e33, DOI 10.1130/0091-7613-31.1.e33
- Mossman DJ, Gauthier-Lafaye F, Jackson SE 2005, "Carbonaceous substances associated with the Paleoproterozoic natural nuclear fission reactors of Oklo, Gabon", Precambrian Res. 138(1-2):2-21 (companion paper on Oklo)
- Buseck PR, Tsipursky SJ, Hettich R 1992, "Fullerenes from the geological environment", Science 257(5067):215-217
- Becker L, Poreda RJ, Bada JL 1996, "Extraterrestrial Helium Trapped in Fullerenes in the Sudbury Impact Structure", Science 272(5259):249-252

Editor's note (2026 audit): (1) Headline says 'four natural-fullerene sites' but body lists only three (Oklo, Karelian shungites, Sudbury). (2) Heymann 2003 comment cited as Geology 31(1):e33, but original Mossman paper is 31(3), comments don't predate the papers they comment on. Suggested edit: Change headline to 'three sites' or specify the fourth. Verify Heymann comment issue number, likely 31(7) or later. Also verify DOI 10.1130/0091-7613-31.1.e33.

Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.