RT Journal Article
T1 The rapid expansion of environmental mineralogy in unconventional ways: Beyond the accepted definition of a mineral, the latest technology, and using nature as our guide
A1 Caraballo Monge, Manuel Antonio
A1 Michel, F. Marc
A1 Hochella Jr., Michel F.
AB Environmental mineralogy is rapidly expanding in technological directions that allow for the detection, characterization, and understanding of non-crystalline and poorly crystalline phases, crystalline-amorphous mixed phases, and nanosized naturally occurring materials. Specifically, this article provides a perspective view of the broad range of structural complexity/heterogeneity observed in environmental minerals and amorphous materials, as well as our current understanding of how these materials can be best observed, evaluated, and described, and why this is important in the mineralogical sciences. The discussion is broken down into the assessment of short- and medium-range order in amorphous materials, and the nature of nanominerals and mineral nanoparticles, amorphous-nanocrystalline transitional phases, and mesocrystals. These materials do not fit one or more aspects of the most commonly used definitions of a mineral (although some of them are formally recognized as minerals, such as ferrihydrite and schwertmannite), yet they do fit other portions of these current definitions. Nevertheless, because these phases can be exceptionally minute in size, and/or not highly crystalline, and/or generally much less abundant than other mineral components in the system, they may be underappreciated and/or understudied, or, apparently as is often the case, completely missed. Yet they are often highly relevant to, and in many cases dominant in, important aspects of how the (bio)geochemistry of an environmental system operates. Furthermore, although it is important to analytically and experimentally characterize synthetic equivalent phases in the laboratory, often under conditions intended to mimic one or a few aspects of the real environment, we argue that it is imperative to study natural, intact (as much as possible) samples and make field measurements with much greater frequency than is currently practiced.
PB Mineralogical Society of America
SN 0003-004X
SN 1945-3027 (electrónico)
YR 2015
FD 2015
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23137
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23137
LA eng
NO Caraballo, M. A., Michel, F. M., & Hochella, M. F. (2014). The rapid expansion of environmental mineralogy in unconventional ways: Beyond the accepted definition of a mineral, the latest technology, and using nature as our guide. In American Mineralogist (Vol. 100, Issue 1, pp. 14–25). Mineralogical Society of America. https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2015-4749
NO M.A.C. was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Post-doctoral International Mobility Sub-program I+D+i 2008–2011. Grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-FG02-06ER15786) and the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences at Virginia Tech also provided financial support for this project. We are also appreciative of the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency through the Center for Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT) funded under NSF Cooperative Agreement EF-0830093. We also thank four anonymous reviewers and especially Alejandro Fernandez-Martinez (Associate Editor) for their many and thoughtful comments that significantly improved the quality of this paper.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 30 may 2026