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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
Edit2: I guess it's just a big reference catalog. Cool.
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.
FTA I learned about the real list:
http://mineralogy-ima.org/Minlist.htm
http://cnmnc.main.jp/IMA_Master_List_%282022-07%29.pdf
> 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?
But what a neat study area: https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/evolutionary-syst...
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?
This of course, should impact the world building schemes for writers of hard science fiction.
Hope so.