How Math Can Help Geologists Discover

New Minerals
Geological data holds hidden patterns that can reveal new minerals and undiscovered Earth
events.

Abellaite_topimage.jpg

Abellaite, a mineral that Hazen's team predicted in a paper published last year, was recently
discovered in a mine in northeastern Spain.

(Inside Science) -- Last Wednesday, mineralogist Robert Hazen opened an email and learned
that he had been right once again. On the wall of a Chinese cobalt mine, a colleague had found
tiny black crystals that turned out to be a type of cobalt oxide that had never before been found in
nature, with a ratio of three atoms of cobalt to four of oxygen. Hazen's team had predicted it
would be there using "big data" statistical methods, an approach common in other fields but only
now being applied to mineral discovery.

A mineral is any chemical compound with a distinct crystal structure that is formed naturally on
Earth or in space and not created by the body of a living organism. More than 5,200 minerals
have been named and described, and Hazen and his colleagues estimate that at least 1,500 remain
undiscovered. In a series of papers published in the last couple of years, the team has made
detailed predictions about the types of minerals that are missing and where they might be found.
Several have already been discovered, including the new cobalt oxide.
The researchers' latest paper, published today in American Mineralogist, adds a visual twist by
incorporating network analysis, a technique previously used to map things like disease
transmission patterns and Facebook friend networks. These visualization techniques are
revealing relationships and phenomena that were previously hidden, said Hazen.

"It's amazing -- this whole technique of visualizing the world in a very rich way where you
immediately see patterns that you'd never see otherwise," said Hazen, who is a researcher at the
Carnegie Institution for Science and executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory in
Washington D.C.

For example, the types of rare copper-containing minerals that formed in the last 70 million years
are strikingly different from those that formed in the early days of our planet, before life filled
the atmosphere with oxygen, according to the new study. The researchers even claim to have
found evidence of a previously unknown mass extinction that occurred more than 540 million
years ago, according to an unpublished analysis of fossils from the Ediacaran period.

Big Data Shows What's Missing

The "big data" approach would have been impossible until recently. A team at the University of
Arizona has spent the last few years combing through thousands of publications describing
mineral structures and properties, combining their findings into a single database called the
RUFF Project. And since 2001, a nonprofit group called the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy has
been gathering data on where people find particular minerals. Its MINDAT.org database now has
about a million mineral-location pairs, according to Shaunna Morrison, a mineralogist at the
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and first author of the new network analysis
study.

To make their predictions, Morrison, Hazen and their colleagues use the RUFF and MINDAT
databases to compare well known minerals with rare ones that have only occasionally been
collected. In this way, they can calculate the likelihood that researchers and collectors will
identify new minerals in a given place or category in the future, said Hazen.

For example, igneous minerals -- those formed from melted rocks deep in the Earth -- are all
relatively common and well studied, so chances are good that we've found them all, said
Morrison. But of the 66 named cobalt-containing minerals, 22 have been found only in one or
two locations. The team predicts that at least 15 cobalt minerals remain undiscovered.

Some predicted minerals, including the cobalt oxide crystals just discovered in China, are
compounds that were previously synthesized in the lab, so prospectors know exactly what they're
looking for. But, said Hazen, other minerals will be completely new to science.

"We could predict that there's a new copper mineral, or there's a new cobalt mineral. Just
statistically, it has to be there," he said. "But in many cases, we don't know what it looks like."
copper-minerals-cropped.jpg

The colored circles in this diagram represent different types of copper-containing minerals, with
each color representing a chemically related group and lines connecting minerals that are found
together. The way the groups cluster in the diagram may help researchers discover new copper
minerals.
Keck DTDI Project

Mineral Networks on Earth and Beyond

Social networks often use dots to represent people and lines to represent relationships between
them. Similar diagrams have been used to study everything from the brain to Earth's climate,
with visualizations created and analyzed using sophisticated mathematical techniques. Hazen and
his colleagues began applying these methods to minerals on June 7, 2016, during a data
visualization workshop at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

"The data scientists were telling us about some of the techniques they used. And it just struck us:
'Whoa, we could do this with minerals!'" said Hazen.

In mineral networks, each dot is a type of mineral, and the lines usually connect types of
minerals that are found together. By representing minerals this way, Hazen, Morrison and their
colleagues can turn a dense spreadsheet of data into a picture from which patterns jump out.
Thus far, they have completed network analyses of igneous rocks, chromium minerals and
copper minerals. They are continuing to add new groups of minerals and new types of network
diagrams, with ideas coming "faster than our coders can write code," said Hazen.

The implications range from the practical to the cosmic. For example, Hazen is working with the
U.S. Geological Survey to find valuable ore deposits. Morrison, meanwhile, is diagramming
minerals from meteorites and moon rocks, and finding that they don't much resemble networks
of minerals formed on Earth. She suspects the differences are related to Earth's lush coating of
living things.

"What we're seeing so far is that Mars and the moon have pretty different networks than we see
on Earth," she said. "So we think we might be able to apply this to looking at other worlds."

More to Discover

The techniques used in the new study have already proved their worth in other fields, said Alex
Lex, a computer scientist in the Visualization Design Lab at the University of Utah in Salt Lake
City, who was not involved in the project. He sees Hazen and Morrison's latest work as part of a
growing trend, with more and more people from across the sciences discovering the value of
viewing data as networks.

Hazen and Morrison's techniques will be free for anyone to use, and Hazen hopes they will be
adopted by other mineral researchers. But the techniques are still unfamiliar to mineralogy
veterans like Anthony Kampf, curator emeritus of mineral sciences at the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County in California. Kampf has named and described around 200
minerals over his career. He said he feels no personal need for statistical predictions, as his team
of hobbyists already sends him more new mineral specimens than he can keep up with.

All the same, Kampf can see the potential of what Hazen, Morrison and their colleagues are
doing. "The paper seems to be an ambitious and insightful approach to understanding mineral
systems on a broad scale," he wrote in an email. "It’s always exciting to see a new way of
looking at things that reveals hidden relationships."

The scope for discovery may be vast. Indeed, Kampf suspects the universe holds far more than
the 1,500 undiscovered minerals that have so far been predicted. In his estimate, "we're never
going to find them all."

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