The molecule that won a Nobel Prize was sitting in this rock all along

1985: a discovery in a Texas laboratory

In September 1985, three chemists at Rice University in Houston, Robert Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley, were vaporising graphite with a laser inside a helium-cooled chamber. They were trying to recreate the conditions of carbon-rich red giant stars, to understand how the long carbon-chain molecules detected in interstellar space might form. What they found instead was a stable cluster of exactly 60 carbon atoms, arranged in a hollow cage, with the same geometry as a soccer ball: 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.

They named it buckminsterfullerene, after the architect Buckminster Fuller whose geodesic domes share the same geometry. C60. The discovery opened an entirely new branch of carbon chemistry. Synthetic chemists worldwide started making fullerenes in their labs.

The assumption at the time was that fullerenes were a synthetic form of carbon, requiring high temperatures and special conditions of the kind that only happen in laboratories or in space. The other natural carbon allotropes were diamond, graphite, and amorphous carbon. C60 belonged on a separate shelf.

1992: the assumption breaks

Seven years later, in July 1992, a paper appeared in Science under the title "Fullerenes from the geological environment". The authors were Peter Buseck of Arizona State University, Semeon Tsipursky, and Robert Hettich of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had analysed shungite samples from Karelia using high-resolution mass spectrometry. The samples gave clean signals for both C60 and C70, the two most common fullerenes.

The shungite they tested was 2 billion years old. The fullerenes had been sitting in the rock since long before there were laboratories on Earth, before there were animals on Earth, before there were plants on Earth. They had been there for half the age of the planet.

The molecule that the Rice team had thought was a laboratory curiosity in 1985, and that the synthetic-chemistry world had been carefully manufacturing in vacuum chambers ever since, turned out to be something the Earth had been quietly producing on its own, on a vast scale, for two billion years.

1996: the Nobel

In October 1996, Curl, Kroto, and Smalley shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "their discovery of fullerenes". The Nobel committee citation focuses on the 1985 Rice synthesis. It does not mention shungite. But by 1996 the natural-fullerene literature was already underway. The Buseck 1992 paper had been followed up by independent work from other Western labs. Mossman, Eigenbrode, and Crocker had confirmed the result with their own samples in 1998. The Russian-side characterisation, led by Vladimir Kovalevski and Natalia Rozhkova at the Karelian Research Centre in Petrozavodsk, was building out the structural picture of what these natural fullerenes actually look like inside the rock.

The headline number from the 1996 Nobel was the laboratory synthesis. The longer-term scientific story was that the Earth had been making this stuff, by itself, in Karelia, for far longer than anyone had imagined possible.

Where the natural fullerenes go

The Buseck 1992 paper was the first identification of fullerenes in shungite. It was not the last identification of fullerenes in nature. Over the next decade, C60 and related cages turned up in fulgurite (lightning-fused soil; Daly, Buseck, Williams, Lewis 1993), in the Sudbury impact structure in Ontario (Becker, Poreda, Bada 1996), in the Allende meteorite (Becker, Bunch, Allamandola 1999), and at the K-T extinction boundary layer (Heymann, Chibante, Brooks, Wolbach, Smalley 1994, with Smalley himself as a co-author, returning to the molecule he had helped discover, now finding it in the rocks of a planetary catastrophe).

In all of these later cases, the fullerene yields were small and the localities were specific. Shungite remains the largest natural reservoir of fullerene-bearing rock on Earth.

Sources

- Buseck PR, Tsipursky SJ, Hettich R 1992, "Fullerenes from the geological environment", Science 257(5067):215-217, DOI 10.1126/science.257.5067.215
- Curl RF, Kroto HW, Smalley RE 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1996
- Kroto HW, Heath JR, O'Brien SC, Curl RF, Smalley RE 1985, "C60: Buckminsterfullerene", Nature 318:162-163
- Buseck PR, Galdobina LP, Kovalevski VV, Rozhkova NN, Valley JW, Zaidenberg AZ 1997, "Shungites: The C-rich rocks of Karelia, Russia", Canadian Mineralogist 35(6):1363-1378
- Mossman DJ, Eigenbrode JL, Crocker MJ 1998, "Occurrence of natural fullerenes in low grade metamorphosed Proterozoic shungite", Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 63(11-12):1919-1924
- Buseck PR 2002, "Geological fullerenes: review and analysis", Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 203(3-4):781-792, DOI 10.1016/S0012-821X(02)00819-1

Editor's note (2026 audit): Mossman Eigenbrode Crocker citation in GCA 63(11-12), that volume is from 1999, not 1998. Likely accepted 1998 / published 1999 convention. Suggested edit: Update year to 1999 (or note 'accepted 1998, published 1999').

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.