The Evolution of Mineral Hardness Reveals Both Changing Parageneses and Preservational Bias in the Mineralogical Record (original) (raw)
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A preliminary list of plausible near-surface minerals present during Earth’s Hadean Eon (>4.0 Ga) should be expanded to include: (1) phases that might have formed by precipitation of organic crystals prior to the rise of predation by cellular life; (2) minerals associated with large bolide impacts, especially through the generation of hydrothermal systems in circumferential fracture zones; and (3) local formation of minerals with relatively oxidized transition metals through abiological redox processes, such as photo-oxidation. Additional mineral diversity arises from the occurrence of some mineral species that form more than one ‘natural kind’, each with distinct chemical and morphological characteristics that arise by different paragenetic processes. Rare minerals, for example those containing essential B, Mo, or P, are not necessary for the origins of life. Rather, many common minerals incorporate those and other elements as trace and minor constituents. A rich variety of chem...
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The mineralogy of terrestrial planets evolves as a consequence of a range of physical, chemical, and biological processes. In pre-stellar molecular clouds, widely dispersed microscopic dust particles contain approximately a dozen refractory minerals that represent the starting point of planetary mineral evolution. Gravitational clumping into a protoplanetary disk, star formation, and the resultant heating in the stellar nebula produce primary refractory constituents of chondritic meteorites, including chondrules and calcium-aluminum inclusions, with ~60 different mineral phases. Subsequent aqueous and thermal alteration of chondrites, asteroidal accretion and differentiation, and the consequent formation of achondrites results in a mineralogical repertoire limited to ~250 different minerals found in unweathered meteorite samples.
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The oldest vestiges of crust and marine environments occur only in a few remote areas on Earth today. These rocks are Hadean–Eoarchean in age (~4.5 to 3.6 billion years old) and represent the only available archive of the mineral environments in which life originated. A mineral inventory of the oldest rocks would thus help to constrain the likeliest minerals involved in the origin of life. Such a survey is important from the perspective of mineral evolution, as the emergence of life and subsequent global changes caused by organisms were responsible for more than half the 4400 known minerals on the modern Earth.
No evidence for Hadean continental crust within Earth's oldest evolved rock unit
Due to the acute scarcity of very ancient rocks, the composition of Earth's embryonic crust during the Hadean eon (>4.0 billion years ago) is a critical unknown in our search to understand how the earliest continents evolved. Whether the Hadean Earth was dominated by mafic-composition crust, similar to today's oceanic crust 1-4 , or included significant amounts of continental crust 5-8 remains an unsolved question that carries major implications for the earliest atmosphere, the origin of life, and the geochemical evolution of the crust-mantle system. Here we present new U-Pb and Hf isotope data on zircons from the only precisely dated Hadean rock unit on Earth-a 4,019.6 ± 1.8 Myr tonalitic gneiss unit in the Acasta Gneiss Complex, Canada. Combined zircon and whole-rock geochemical data from this ancient unit shows no indication of derivation from, or interaction with, older Hadean continental crust. Instead, the data provide the first direct evidence that the oldest known evolved crust on Earth was generated from an older ultramafic or mafic reservoir that probably surfaced the early Earth.
Scientific Reports
Earth surface redox conditions are intimately linked to the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere. Minerals provide a record of Earth’s evolving surface and interior chemistry in geologic time due to many different processes (e.g. tectonic, volcanic, sedimentary, oxidative, etc.). Here, we show how the bipartite network of minerals and their shared constituent elements expanded and evolved over geologic time. To further investigate network expansion over time, we derive and apply a novel metric (weighted mineral element electronegativity coefficient of variation; wMEECV) to quantify intra-mineral electronegativity variation with respect to redox. We find that element electronegativity and hard soft acid base (HSAB) properties are central factors in mineral redox chemistry under a wide range of conditions. Global shifts in mineral element electronegativity and HSAB associations represented by wMEECV changes at 1.8 and 0.6 billion years ago align with decreased continental eleva...
Needs and opportunities in mineral evolution research
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Progress in understanding mineral evolution, Earth's changing near-surface mineralogy through time, depends on the availability of detailed information on mineral localities of known ages and geologic settings. A comprehensive database including this information, employing the mindat.org web site as a platform, is now being implemented. This resource will incorporate software to correlate a range of mineral occurrences and properties vs. time, and it will thus facilitate studies of the changing diversity, distribution, associations, and characteristics of individual minerals as well as mineral groups. The Mineral Evolution Database thus holds the prospect of revealing mineralogical records of important geophysical, geochemical, and biological events in Earth history.
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The "Anthropocene Epoch" has been proposed as a new post-Holocene geological time interval-a period characterized by the pervasive impact of human activities on the geological record. Prior to the influence of human technologies, the diversity and distribution of minerals at or near Earth's surface arose through physical, chemical, and/or biological processes. Since the advent of human mining and manufacturing, particularly since the industrial revolution of the mid-eighteenth century, mineral-like compounds have experienced a punctuation event in diversity and distribution owing to the pervasive impact of human activities. We catalog 208 mineral species approved by the International Mineralogical Association that occur principally or exclusively as a consequence of human processes. At least three types of human activities have affected the diversity and distribution of minerals and mineral-like compounds in ways that might be reflected in the worldwide stratigraphic record. The most obvious influence is the widespread occurrence of synthetic mineral-like compounds, some of which are manufactured directly for applications (e.g., YAG crystals for lasers; Portland cement) and others that arise indirectly (e.g., alteration of mine tunnel walls; weathering products of mine dumps and slag). A second human influence on the distribution of Earth's near-surface minerals relates to large-scale movements of rocks and sediments-sites where large volumes of rocks and minerals have been removed. Finally, humans have become relentlessly efficient in redistributing select natural minerals, such as gemstones and fine mineral specimens, across the globe. All three influences are likely to be preserved as distinctive stratigraphic markers far into the future.