The Russian microscopist who looked at shungite up close and saw spheres

Nikolai Yushkin

In 1994, Nikolai Pavlovich Yushkin (Николай Павлович Юшкин, 1936-2012), director of the Institute of Geology at the Komi Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Syktyvkar, published a short paper in Доклады Академии Наук (Doklady AN, the Reports of the Academy of Sciences). The title was "Глобулярная супрамолекулярная структура шунгита: данные сканирующей туннельной микроскопии" (Globular Supramolecular Structure of Shungite: Data from Scanning Tunneling Microscopy). Doklady AN 337(6):800-803.

Yushkin's team had imaged shungite using one of the most powerful microscopes of the early 1990s, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), which can resolve features down to single nanometres. What they saw, looking at clean shungite surfaces, was that the carbon was not amorphous in the conventional sense. It was organised into spherical globules, roughly six nanometres in diameter, packed together to make up the bulk of the rock.

Six nanometres is small. About sixty thousand of them, lined up, would span a millimetre. About six million of them would tile a square millimetre. The bulk shungite that you can hold in your hand is, at the nanoscale, a foam of these globules.

Why this mattered

The Yushkin globule paper, published two years after Buseck's 1992 detection of fullerenes in shungite, gave the Russian-side characterisation of how the fullerene-related carbon was organised inside the rock. Buseck and his Western colleagues had shown what molecules were there. Yushkin was showing the architecture those molecules built when they assembled.

The globule structure suggested that shungite was not just a rock containing trace fullerenes. It was a rock made primarily of fullerene-related curved carbon, assembled into roughly spherical six-nanometre clusters, with the C60 and C70 molecules being the smallest end of a spectrum that extended up through these much larger structures. The picture that emerged was of shungite as a natural reservoir of hierarchical carbon nanostructures, from individual fullerene molecules through to globules sixty times larger.

The line that followed

Yushkin's 1994 paper started a Russian-side research programme that has continued for thirty years. His successor at Komi Science Centre, Yevgeny Golubev, extended the imaging work using atomic force microscopy and produced increasingly detailed pictures of the globules and their internal structure. At the Karelian Research Centre in Petrozavodsk, Natalia Rozhkova developed methods for extracting the globules from the rock into stable aqueous dispersions, and showed (Rozhkova 2010, Russian Journal of General Chemistry 80(6):1170-1175) that they survive intact in water.

The current best theoretical model of the globule architecture, developed by Evgeniya Sheka at Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, treats the globules as fractal aggregates of nanoscale reduced graphene oxide platelets, curved into approximately spherical shapes by the strain of edge functional groups. Sheka and Rozhkova's 2014 paper in the International Journal of Smart Nano Materials gave this model its most accessible English-language statement, with the memorable subtitle "shungite as the natural pantry of nanoscale reduced graphene oxide".

What you can see with the naked eye

You cannot see a six-nanometre globule with the naked eye. The wavelength of visible light is around 500 nanometres, almost a hundred times bigger than the globules. What you can see is the macro-scale consequence: the slight metallic glint of fresh shungite surfaces, the way the rock conducts a small electric current (which it can, because the percolating sp2 carbon network bridges between the globules), and the matte black colour that absorbs across the entire visible spectrum.

The globules are the explanation for a lot of shungite's macro-scale behaviour. The conductivity comes from them. The electromagnetic absorption (the Antonets group's measurements, covered in another thread) comes from them. The interaction with biological molecules (Goryunov 2014 on lysozyme, covered separately) comes from them.

Sources

- Yushkin NP 1994, "Глобулярная супрамолекулярная структура шунгита: данные сканирующей туннельной микроскопии", Доклады Академии Наук 337(6):800-803
- Rozhkova NN 2010, "Aggregation and stabilization of shungite carbon nanoparticles", Russian Journal of General Chemistry 80(6):1170-1175, DOI 10.1134/S1070363210060277
- Sheka EF, Rozhkova NN 2014, "Shungite as the natural pantry of nanoscale reduced graphene oxide", International Journal of Smart Nano Materials 5(1):1-16, DOI 10.1080/19475411.2014.885913
- Razbirin BS, Rozhkova NN, Sheka EF, Nelson DK, Starukhin AN 2014, "Fractals of graphene quantum dots in photoluminescence of shungite", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 118(5):735-746, DOI 10.1134/S1063776114040165
- Buseck PR, Tsipursky SJ, Hettich R 1992, "Fullerenes from the geological environment", Science 257(5067):215-217

Editor's note (2026 audit): DOI for Razbirin 2014 cited as 10.1134/S1063776114040165, should be 10.1134/S1063776114050161 (matches JETP volume 118 issue 5). Suggested edit: Fix DOI to 10.1134/S1063776114050161. Cross-check with Thread 185.

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