How Minerals Define An Area

Minerals are defined by their unique combination of chemical composition and crystal structure. Rather like the words in a book some minerals are commonly found while others are rare and define the vocabulary present in a book. A mineral species is only likely to be found in one location about 22 percent of the time. Finding the same mineral species in more than five locations is an extremely rare event.

This is why certain areas are easily mined for a specific mineral while you will have no trace of the same mineral in certain other areas. Rare minerals define our planet’s mineralogical diversity as per Robert Hazen. Hazen has been studying the diversity of minerals in the soil and has analysed large chunks of the Earth’s surface. He believes that thousands of plausible rare minerals either still await discovery or have been buried and lost in Earth’s violent tectonic plate rebalances.

Hazen and his colleagues predicted that nearly 35 percent of sodium minerals remain undiscovered, because more than half of them are white, poorly crystallized, or water soluble. By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of copper, magnesium, and copper minerals have not been discovered. Needless to say the results of this science study will keep mineralogists busy for decades!