Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

At the precise moment I write this, there is information about
108,230,950 organic and inorganic chemical substances from the World\'s
disclosed chemistry. So it was with a sense of curiosity that I came
across this article in the American
Mineralogist\[cite\]/10.2138/am-2015-5417\[/cite\] entitled \"Earth's
"missing" minerals\" (the first in a series of articles apparently
planned on the topic of the missing ones). The abstract is particularly
interesting and whilst I encourage you to go read the article itself, I
will quote some eye-catching observations from just this abstract:

1.  Mineralogists can apparently accurately estimate a mineralogical
    diversity of (just) 6394 minerals; compare this with the number
    of 108,230,950 recorded for organic and inorganic molecules.
2.  Of which however \> 1563 have yet to be described (\~25%). 
3.  The elements Al, B, C, Cr, Cu, Mg, Na, Ni, P, S, Si, Ta, Te, U, and
    V are geochemically diverse.
4.  Of this subset, Al, B, C, Cr, P, Si, and Ta, again \~25% remain to
    be discovered.
5.  Almost 35% of the predicted minerals containing Na are undiscovered,
    probably because they are white, poorly crystallised and
    water-soluble!
6.  But fewer then 20% of the minerals of Cu, Mg, Ni, S, Te, U, and V
    remain to be discovered, attributed to their economic value and
    often bright colours!
7.  At 9.9%, Te has the smallest predicted percentage of missing
    minerals of the elements studied.
8.  The disparities in percentages of undiscovered minerals is
    attributed in part to sociological factors in the search, discovery,
    and description of mineral species.

Of course comparison with the whole of molecular chemistry is difficult;
minerals are natural species, mostly formed I presume without the help
of living organisms. Which makes me wonder what proportion of
the 108,230,950 organic and inorganic chemical substances noted above
occur naturally and have been formed without the help of living
organisms. The latter of course are called \"natural products\", and
there must be many millions of those.

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**Postscript**. If you want to search for the crystal structures of
minerals, this site is useful:
[http://database.iem.ac.ru/mincryst/](http://database.iem.ac.ru/mincryst/){target="_blank"}

 

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At the precise moment I write this, there is information about 108,230,950 organic and inorganic chemical substances from the World's disclosed chemistry.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Earth’s missing chemistry.