Nature Used 57 Recipes to Create Earth’s 10,500 “Mineral Kinds”

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.

if you hit the volcanoes directly on the big number 57, they'll release their magma without making a mess.

AFAIK, the "-ite" suffix literally means "rock", so it's not surprising that you get all kinds of things prefixed to it.

Actual list, from your link, a 229pp PDF:

http://cnmnc.main.jp/IMA_Master_List_%282022-07%29.pdf

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.

> But what a neat study area

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?

No

Not even a little.