Definition
Mineralogy is the scientific study of minerals. The issue at hand is the definition of the term “mineral, ” which was first used in Medieval Latin in the late fourteenth century as minerale, or “something mined.” The term survives today in common use forms, for example, “mineral water” and “vitamins and minerals” that have nothing to do with the science of mineralogy. The minerals of mineralogy are most traditionally defined in the past decade or two as naturally occurring inorganic substances, produced by geochemical processes, with an ordered, repeating atomic arrangement (a crystalline substance) whose composition can be described by a chemical formula resulting in a definite, but not necessarily fixed, composition. Samples of the same mineral vary in terms of minor and/or trace element composition, and in the case of solid solution, major element composition as long as these substitutions do not change the average crystalline atomic structure. If a change does occur, a...
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Hochella, M.F. (2016). Mineralogy. In: White, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geochemistry. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39193-9_308-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39193-9_308-1
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