The impact of the earth’s geological conditions on life is obvious, and organisms adapt to different environments such as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. However, the full impact of life on geological conditions is easily overlooked. Now a new, comprehensive study of our planet’s minerals bridges that omission. Some findings of the study can prove that about half of the mineral diversity is directly or indirectly generated by living things and their by-products . The discovery could provide valuable insights for scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history, as well as for those looking for evidence of life beyond Earth. In two papers published in the journal American Mineralogist, researchers introduce a new classification system for classifying minerals that focuses on exactly how they formed, not just what they were. Exterior. In doing so, their system acknowledges that Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life interacted. Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, identified more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That’s nearly double the roughly 5,800 mineral “classes” in the International Mineralogical Association’s classic classification, which categorizes minerals strictly by their crystal structure and chemical makeup.
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