User:RockMagnetist (DCO visiting scholar)/Drafts/Robert Hazen

Mineral evolution
At a Christmas party in 2006, the biophysicist Harold Morowitz asked Hazen whether there were clay minerals during the Archean Eon. Hazen could not recall a mineralogist ever having asked whether a given mineral existed in a given era, and it occurred to him that no one had ever explored how Earth's mineralogy changed over time. He worked on this question for a year with his closest colleague, geochemist Dimitri Sverjensky at Johns Hopkins University, and some other collaborators including a mineralogist, Robert Downs; a petrologist, John Ferry; and a geobiologist, Dominic Papineau. The result was a paper in American Mineralogist that provided a new historical context to mineralogy that they called mineral evolution. Based on a review of the literature, they estimated that the number of minerals in the Solar System has grown from about a dozen at the time of its formation to over 4300 at present. (As of 2017, the latter number has grown to 5300. ). They predicted that there was a systematic increase in the number of mineral species over time, and for the Earth's history divided the changes into three main eras: The formation of the Solar System and planets; the reworking of crust and mantle and the onset of plate tectonics; and the appearance of life. After the first era, there were 250 minerals; after the second, 1500. The remainder were made possible by the action of living organisms.

Public engagement
Popular books on science include The Story of Earth,