Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

Hazen said that each one of those kinds of pyrite tells a different story about our planet, its origin, and how it has changed over time.

Hazen and Morrison define a combination of the mineral species with its mechanism of origin as "kind" minerals. They used machine learning analysis to identify 10,556 different types of minerals.

All known minerals were created by 57 separate processes. The processes included weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformation inside the mantle, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, and even condensations in space before the planet formed. Water is the most important factor in the diversity of minerals on the planet.

One-third of all mineral kinds are formed by bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidneys stones, which are all rich in mineral content. germanium compounds are found in industrial coal fires and are shaped by life's activity. Half of all minerals have life's fingerprints on them.

Nita Sahai is a biomineralization specialist at the University of Akron in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. The boundary between animals, vegetables, and minerals is not static. Most of the minerals in the human body are locked away in the scaffolding that protects our teeth and bones.

Morrison and Hazen's new Taxonomy put a nice systematization on it and made it more accessible to a broader community.

Some scientists will be happy with the new Mineral Taxonomy. Sarah Carmichael is a mineralogy researcher at Appalachian State University. Carlos Gray Santana is a philosopher of science at the University of Utah and he is standing by the IMA system. He said that the IMA taxonomy still works well in chemistry, mining, and engineering because it was developed for those purposes. It serves our needs well.