The original PNAS publication can be found at [0]. I copy here (most of) the abstract, I think it's very nicely written: "Plato envisioned Earth’s building blo

The original PNAS publication can be found at [0]. I copy here (most of) the abstract, I think it's very nicely written: "Plato envisioned Earth’s building blocks as cubes, a shape rarely found in nature. The solar system is littered, however, with distorted polyhedra—shards of rock and ice produced by ubiquitous fragmentation. We apply the theory of convex mosaics to show that the average geometry of natural two-dimensional (2D) fragments, from mud cracks to Earth’s tectonic plates, has two attractors: “Platonic” quadrangles and “Voronoi” hexagons. In three dimensions (3D), the Platonic attractor is dominant: Remarkably, the average shape of natural rock fragments is cuboid. When viewed through the lens of convex mosaics, natural fragments are indeed geometric shadows of Plato’s forms. Simulations show that generic binary breakup drives all mosaics toward the Platonic attractor, explaining the ubiquity of cuboid averages." [0] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/16/2001037117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/16/2001037117