Unfastening pearl nacre nanostructures under shear

Planetary ball milling of nacre is effective in unfastening the aragonite tablets in high yield with minimal damage, with some of the organic mortar remaining intact on the tablets. The milling process provides a means for transforming a waste material, nacre, which was harvested from pristine waters, into an uncontaminated powder form of the biogenic material with a unimodal particle size distribution for bio-applications or for providing accessible amounts of CaCO3.