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Mineral ecology

In 2011, several researchers began to develop a Mineral Evolution Database. This database integrates the crowd-sourced site Mindat.org, which has over 690,000 mineral-locality pairs, with the official IMA list of approved minerals and age data from geological publications.

This database makes it possible to apply statistics to answer new questions, an approach that has been called mineral ecology. One such question is how much of mineral evolution is deterministic and how much the result of chance. Some factors are deterministic, such as the chemical nature of a mineral and conditions for its stability; but mineralogy can also be affected by the processes that determine a planet's composition. In a 2015 paper, Robert Hazen and others analyzed the number of minerals involving each element as a function of its abundance. They found that Earth, with over 4800 known minerals and 72 elements, has a power law relationship. The Moon, with only 63 minerals and 24 elements (based on a much smaller sample) has essentially the same relationship. This implies that, given the chemical composition of the planet, one could predict the more common minerals. However, the distribution has a long tail, with 34% of the minerals having been found at only one or two locations. The model predicts that thousands more mineral species may await discovery or have formed and then been lost to erosion, burial or other processes. This implies a role of chance in the formation of rare minerals occur.

In another use of big data sets, network theory was applied to a dataset of carbon minerals, revealing new patterns in their diversity and distribution. The analysis can show which minerals tend to coexist and what conditions (geological, physical, chemical and biological) are associated with them. This information can be used to predict where to look for new deposits and even new mineral species.