Carbon mineral ecology: Predicting the undiscovered minerals of carbon

Abstract

Studies in mineral ecology exploit mineralogical databases to document diversity-distribution relationships of minerals—relationships that are integral to characterizing "Earth-like" planets. As carbon is the most crucial element to life on Earth, as well as one of the defining constituents of a planet's near-surface mineralogy, we focus here on the diversity and distribution of carbon-bearing minerals. We applied a Large Number of Rare Events (LNRE) model to the 403 known minerals of carbon, using 82 922 mineral species/locality data tabulated in http://mindat.org (as of 1 January 2015). We find that all carbon-bearing minerals, as well as subsets containing C with O, H, Ca, or Na, conform to LNRE distributions.