Lots of new minerals are being discovered
https://www.mindat.org/min-471064.html
Is from a paper in 2024 , you can trawl your way through all sorts of minerals in the website .
You mean something like bauxite?
Stranger
Not necessarily. If they still fall under the same families as existing minerals, they may not be a new rock. Rock classification is fairly coarse in its resolution. A rock may be defined as 90% Mineral X, 10% Other and if your new mineral is in that 10%, it would still be that same rock type - see e.g dunite or quartzite.
Also, AFAIK, pentaheptite carbon is strictly theoretical, not something found in nature or even in a lab. “Discovered” is a strong word to use there - “proposed” or "predicted: is much more accurate.
Yep. But new mineral =/= new rock
If you think bauxite is an interesting new rock, we have lots more to show you.
No, I mean minerals that are composed of a “metal-ceramic matrix” are quite common. Most found on Earth are metallic oxides because most metallic elements are pretty reactive and free diatomic oxygen has been ever-present in the atmosphere for the last 3.5 billion years but only rarely are metals found in nearly pure veins and nuggets.
Stranger
Rocks, as well as minerals and mineraloids must be naturally occurring by definition. Without such limit to the definition we would have to call concrete a type of rock abundantly found on Earth’s surface. Even disqualified as an aggregate with irregular composition, it can be made from just cement and naturally occurring rocks. And according to one source, there are naturally occurring deposits of cement, apparently similar to modern Portland Cement:
The AI company Deepmind created a program called GNOME that came up with 2.2 million new inorganic crystal structures.
Human experimentation had only come up with 20,000. The inorganic crystal structure database has 210,000 inorganic crystals.
According to the International Mineralogical Association, there are over 5,000 known minerals on earth.
So I suppose its possible that there are endless other variations of rocks and minerals that do not occur on earth.
Interesting thing about bauxite – it’s not really a single mineral. It doesn’t have one fixed composition, but it a collection of aluminum hydroxides, iron compounds, clay, and random other stuff. Giving it that single name “bauxite” is kinda misleading. Lots of useful ores are mixtures of things, but bauxite is even more varied than most.
Humans are creating useful new minerals all the time, often in beautiful single crystals. For example new perovskites for superconductors or solar cells, new semiconductors for lasers, LEDs, photodiodes, and exotic transistors; exotic garnets like YAG for lasers and GGG with ten different elements for magnetic bubble memories; and YSZ for jewelry, This is not an answer to the question, since none of these fit the definition of rocks.
Generally speaking, a rock isn’t the thing that has interesting and useful properties, a rock is the thing that you crush to dust to extract the elements and minerals that have the interesting and useful properties. (Rocks tend to be used for stacking on top of each other for looking at or living in, or carved into interesting shapes for looking at or wearing.)
I disagree. I can’t really think of any minerals I’d characterize that way. That’s the language of materials science, not mineralogy. Closest thing I could think of would be corundum with rutile inclusions, but that’s not the same thing as a single mineral composed of both ceramic and metal.
And bauxite is a rock, not a mineral.
Hard disagree.
I’d call those stones.
In the context of building space elevators and fusion reactors they aren’t. I can see, say, a specific feldspar turning out to have an exotic use in high tech, but not “granite”. Granite is what you use to build the building you do the high tech stuff in.
That specific context wouldn’t be what I’d call “generally speaking”, though.
Well that specific context is what this thread is about.
The OP asked a lot of different fairly open-ended questions, not just about exotic materials for space elevators and fusion reactors.
And that still wouldn’t be “generally speaking”.
Just as an example, in the context of the OP, I find plastistone far more interesting than individual minerals, given what it says about the Anthropocene
I have always wanted to know what type of minerals are in the deeper areas of our own planet. I think that being a geologist who could drill down to those depths would be fascinated by the minerals that are subject to the kind of forces our gravity places the rocks under. From what I have read the issues is that the deeper we drill the more heat there is to deal with. Some new technology must be invented to deal with that.
This article deals with that. The Tablelands in Newfoundland are a chunk of the mantle that got pushed to the surface by plate tectonics. The composition of the rocks are different than rocks on the surface and actually hostile to life, so the Tablelands are largely barren.
Are glasses rocks? I am reading no, because no crystal structures, but yes obsidian is an igneous rock that is a glass.
I have some vague recollection of exotic glass structures predicted but not yet observed? Would those count?
Rocks may consist of mineraloids which aren’t crystalline. So amorphous substances like obsidian are also rocks.