[HN Gopher] Nature Used 57 Recipes to Create Earth's 10,500 "Min...
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Nature Used 57 Recipes to Create Earth's 10,500 "Mineral Kinds"
Author : NickRandom
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-07-05 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (carnegiescience.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (carnegiescience.edu)
| irrational wrote:
| > Some 296 known minerals are thought to pre-date Earth itself,
| of which 97 are known only from meteorites, with the age of some
| individual mineral grains estimated at 7 billion years--which was
| billions of years before the origin of our Solar System.
|
| > The oldest known minerals are tiny, durable zircon crystals
| that are almost 4.4 billion years old.
|
| Isn't the first quote saying the oldest minerals are 7+ billion
| years old and the second saying the oldest are 4.4 billion years
| old? Which is it?
| billiam wrote:
| I think they are saying the earliest extant minerals that
| crystalized on Earth are zircons that formed within the first
| 100 my of the planet's formation. The minerals he is talking
| about show up here on meteorites from elsewhere in the solar
| systems and predate the planetary nebulae by billions of years.
| sbf501 wrote:
| As an amateur rockhound, I've always been suspicious of mineral
| names because there are dozens of things called "-ite" which
| sound like random words or names suffixed with -ite. After
| reading this article, with 10,500 minerals, I guess I'm not
| surprised the names are so silly.
|
| FTA I learned about the real list:
|
| http://mineralogy-ima.org/Minlist.htm
| marcosdumay wrote:
| AFAIK, the "-ite" suffix literally means "rock", so it's not
| surprising that you get all kinds of things prefixed to it.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| So, can we use this knowledge when we eventually get to 16
| Psyche, find tons of base element minerals, and need to start
| assembling more sophisticated building-blocks to allow us to
| manufacture things .. in space?
|
| Hope so.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Not even a little.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| No
| [deleted]
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Wait, so everything reduces down to Heinz condiments? Edit:
| seriously though what is this about 57... did I miss their joke?
| It's in the title but not in the article... I have a PhD in
| geochemistry and the article didn't really make any sense to
| me... Clustering minerals by formation mechanism and era? Why? I
| guess I'd have to read the paper.
|
| Edit2: I guess it's just a big reference catalog. Cool.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Apparently there are fifty-seven "paragenetic modes," wherein a
| paragenetic mode is defined as a genesis for the creation of a
| mineral. One such mode would be condensation directly to a
| solid from a gas in the context of "condensation at volcanic
| fumaroles." The bit about pyrites is that there are an
| astounding twenty-four ways you can make them. So, this looks
| like a new lens with which to examine and classify minerals,
| after going through a very large catalog of them tabulating
| each manner of formation allowed.
|
| Some of them are surface oxidation and weathering, some are
| stellar (!), and so on. Given that you can arrange at least
| _some_ of these modes (why paragenetic?) in time order, you
| could look at what kinds of minerals, whole classes of them,
| could form and _when_ , or as you put it, what era.
|
| I'm not sure of the utility of this, but then I'm not a
| geologist. Looks like a nifty classification method. Perhaps
| you could come up with "Incidence of mineral X ought to be
| correlated with incidence of mineral Y," although I thought
| that was already pretty exhaustive.
| a-dub wrote:
| if you hit the volcanoes directly on the big number 57, they'll
| release their magma without making a mess.
| [deleted]
| nickhalfasleep wrote:
| I hate press releases that do not link to the work.
|
| But what a neat study area:
| https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/evolutionary-syst...
| mncharity wrote:
| > But what a neat study area
|
| Hazen created mineral evolution as an organizational scaffold
| to help his intro mineralogy students. And then incrementally
| pushed it younger, eventually becoming a NOVA episode.
|
| Wielding primary research to create more accessible and
| powerful content for young students, seems massively
| underutilized. And very poorly incentivized. The most used
| college intro astronomy texts can't be bothered to even get the
| color of the Sun right. What might science education content
| look like, if it were much more mineral evolution and much less
| yellow Sun?
| docmechanic wrote:
| Yes, his book, The Story of Earth, just took the top of my
| head right off. Just fascinating to think of the co-evolution
| of minerals and biological life.
|
| This of course, should impact the world building schemes for
| writers of hard science fiction.
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