Exploring Carbon Mineral Systems: Recent Advances in C Mineral Evolution, Mineral Ecology, and Network Analysis

Abstract

Large and growing data resources on the spatial and temporal diversity and distribution of the more than 400 carbon-bearing mineral species reveal patterns of mineral evolution and ecology. Recent advances in analytical and visualization techniques leverage these data and are propelling mineralogy from a largely descriptive field into one of prediction within complex, integrated, multidimensional systems. These discoveries include: (1) systematic changes in the character of carbon minerals and their networks of coexisting species through deep time; (2) improved statistical predictions of the number and types of carbon minerals that occur on Earth but are yet to be discovered and described; and (3) a range of proposed and ongoing studies related to the quantification of network structures and trends, relation of mineral "natural kinds" to their genetic environments, prediction of the location of mineral species across the globe, examination of the tectonic drivers of mineralization through deep time, quantification of preservational and sampling bias in the mineralogical record, and characterization of feedback relationships between minerals and geochemical environments with microbial populations. These aspects of Earth's carbon mineralogy underscore the complex coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere and highlight the possibility for scientific discovery in Earth and planetary systems.

Geological Factors Impacted Cadmium Availability and use as an Alternative Cofactor for Zinc in the Carbon Fixation Pathways of Marine Diatoms

“…Mineral data were compiled for analysis from the Mineral Evolution Database (MED; [Golden et al., 2019] https://rruff.info/evolution/; Accessed February 3, 2020). The process of assembling, sorting and downloading mineral data from the MED is described in detail for carbon minerals by (Morrison et al., 2020). The data included 25 Cd mineral species, 307 Cd mineral localities, 255 Zn mineral species, and 10,837 Zn mineral localities (Cd and Zn minerals in Table ).…”

Data Science for Geoscience: Recent Progress and Future Trends from the Perspective of a Data Life Cycle

“…It has a small team of database administrators and data reviewers, and is open to thousands of data contributors and users across the world. Researchers have used data of Mindat in many recent studies on mineral evolution and mineral ecology (Hazen et al, 2011;Morrison et al, 2020).…”

“…Golden et al (2019) has searched over 1,600 publications and several existing databases to extract such age data and then used them to enrich the Mineral Evolution Database. The updated database underpinned many new research discoveries, including mineral evolution and ecology (Morrison et al, 2019(Morrison et al, , 2020 and the co-evolution between the geosphere and the biosphere (Spielman and Moore, 2020). The database also derived new designs of mineral species databases and discussions on better ways for data curation and sharing (Prabhu et al, 2021).…”

Minerals Determined a Special Ecological Niche and Selectively Enriched Microbial Species from Bulk Water Communities in Hot Springs

“…It is well known that microbial species are coupled and co-evolve with the environment where they live [ 1 , 2 ]. Hot springs, remarkably similar to ancient environments, are one of the optimum systems to study the direct influence and feedback between Earth materials (e.g., geochemical environment) and microbial populations [ 1 ]. The terrestrial hot springs are characterized by extreme geochemical conditions and diverse mineralogical composition [ 3 ].…”

“…The effect of mineralogical compositions on niche partitioning is important because community composition, metabolic function distributions, and community assembly processes are heavily influenced by mineral composition [ 3 , 19 , 23 , 24 ]. Network-based analysis has shown its advantage in deciphering ecologically meaningful interactions between microbial species and between microbes and environmental conditions [ 1 , 23 , 24 , 25 ]. This offers a new approach to study the contribution of mineralogical composition to the ecological niche partitioning of thermophiles when considering water geochemistry together with mineralogical composition.…”