Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth
upstart writes:
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.
[...] 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.
[...] Take, for example, pyrite crystals (commonly known as fool's gold). "Pyrite forms in 21 fundamentally different ways," Hazen said. Some pyrite crystals form when chloride-rich iron deposits heat up deep underground over millions of years. Others form in cold ocean sediments as a byproduct of bacteria that break down organic matter on the seafloor. Still others are associated with volcanic activity, groundwater seepage, or coal mines.
"Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it's changed through time," said Hazen.
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