[Rockhounds] Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms
adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and
oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.

A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that
omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral
diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their
byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to
scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history — and also
to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

In a pair of papers published today in American Mineralogist, researchers
Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison and their collaborators outline a new
taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on
precisely how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their
system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of
life influence each other.

Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of
scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals.
That’s almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral “species” in the
classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which
focuses strictly on a mineral’s crystalline structure and chemical makeup.

“That’s the classification system that’s been used for over 200 years, and
the one that I grew up with and learned and studied and bought into,” said
Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in
Washington, D.C. To him, its fixation on mineral structure alone has long
seemed like a monumental shortcoming.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/life-helps-make-almost-half-of-all-minerals-20220701/