Mineral diversification

integrating chemistry, planetary geology, and biology

Mineral diversification may be an educationally useful story. Earth's surface chemistry is a collaborative creation of life and planetary geology. Stories of stellar nucleosyntesis and element distillation are nice, but don't go far enough. Minerology is needed.

Mineral diversification is a 5Gyr history of mineral species incrementally appearing in significant quantities as the result of specific developments in planetary and biologic history.

The stories it might enable include: Crust morphology. Exercising deep-time landmarks. Materials, engineering use of. Materials, crystalline (grains, dislocations, bands and excitons, etc). [What else?]

Open questions include:

• How well does the story hang together? As of 2012, it seems to be in the "travel around giving talks"-shakedown phase.
• Mineral "evolution"?!? Hazen's term. Sigh. Because evolution doesn't have enough misconceptions associated with it already.

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Resources

Robert Hazen (Carnegie Science)
mineral evolution

Notes

Based on Hazen's talk "Recent Advances in Mineral Evolution: The supercontinent cycle, changing ocean geochemistry, and the rise of the terrestrial biosphere." at Harvard on 2013 March 11.

Doables

Hazen's focus is on teaching mineralogy better. He mentioned someone was looking at using mineral diversification in a non-minerology (middle-school?) educational context. Who and how?

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