Journal
AMERICAN MINERALOGIST
Volume 103, Issue 7, Pages 1080-1086Publisher
MINERALOGICAL SOC AMER
DOI: 10.2138/am-2018-6274
Keywords
Vanadium; network analysis; statistical mineralogy; LNRE frequency distribution
Categories
Funding
- Deep Carbon Observatory
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- W.M. Keck Foundation
- NASA
- Carnegie Institution for Science
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We employ large mineralogical data resources to investigate the diversity and spatial distribution of vanadium minerals. Data for 219 approved species (http://http://rruff.info/ima, as of April 15, 2016), representing 5437 mineral species-locality pairs (http://http://mindat.org and other sources, as of April 15, 2016), facilitate statistical evaluation and network analysis of these vanadium minerals. V minerals form a sparse, moderately centralized and transitive network, and they cluster into at least seven groups, each of which indicates distinct paragenetic process. In addition, we construct the V mineral-locality bipartite network to reveal mineral diversity at each locality. It shows that only a few V minerals occur at more than three localities, while most minerals occur at one or two localities, conforming to a Large Number of Rare Events (LNRE) distribution. We apply the LNRE model to predict that at least 307 +/- 30 (1 sigma) vanadium minerals exist in Earth's crust today, indicating that at least 88 species have yet to be discovered-a minimum estimate because it assumes that new minerals will be found only using the same methods as in the past. Numerous additional vanadium minerals likely await discovery using micro-analytical methods. By applying LNRE models to subsets of V minerals, we speculate that most new vanadium minerals are to be discovered in sedimentary or hydrothermal non-U-V ore deposits other than igneous or metamorphic rocks/ore deposits.
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