Life helps make almost half of Earth’s minerals

quantamagazine.org

62 points·theafh··12 comments

When they say “half” they mean half of the kinds. It's not like half of the weight of the minerals on earth.

Many aquagenic minerals are so close to being life themselves. We have way more mineral species on earth than on non-water bearing planets.

Can you give an example or a link? When I search for "aquagenic minerals," I find absolutely nothing like what I infer to be "minerals that generate water."

It's possible that "aquagenic minerals" means "minerals that are created in water"; it would be weird for minerals to generate water.

I'm imagining they mean mineral hydrates but maybe I'm wrong.

It might be a neologism but im using it in the sense of biogenic and abiogenic mineral creation.

Maybe, your IFL Science link is talking about mineral hydrates.

https://www.iflscience.com/catalog-of-every-known-mineral-on...

6000 minerals and over 10,000 mineral kinds, 80% of which result from water-based production processes (what I’m referring to as aquagenic formation). Not sure the proper term, sorry for the confusion.

https://v2.nl/publishing/tiny-mining-a-handbook-for-internal...

Shame the paper itself is behind a paywall.

We could just comment on the title...

Preprint http://www.minsocam.org/msa/ammin/AM_Preprints/8105HazenPrep...

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