Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

Extraits de cet article:

One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things — such as bits of bones, teeth, coral and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.

Historically, scientists “have artificially drawn a line between what is geochemistry and what is biochemistry,” said Nita Sahai, a biomineralization specialist at the University of Akron in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. In reality, the boundary between animal, vegetable and mineral is much more fluid. Human bodies, for example, are around 2% minerals by weight, most of it locked away in the calcium phosphate scaffolding that reinforces our teeth and bones.