The father of Mineral Evolution
From Robert Hazen “December 6, 2006, Harold Morowitz asked me a simple question: “Were there clay minerals in the Archean?” That question has important implications for origin-of-life models that depend on clays, but the answer is not at all obvious. And it’s a question that mineralogists never thought to ask. I was immediately struck by the idea that Earth’s mineralogy must have changed over 4.5 billion years of history in ways that had never been thoughtfully explored.” — Robert Hazen
And what a doozy of a topic it is. I’ve been diving into his work and just loooove it. Absolutely earth-shaking (PUN INTENDED) stuff. HE should win the Nobel prize! But there is not category for him to win.
The six Nobel Prize categories are Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences. There is no GEOLOGY. WTF. GEOLOGY ROCKS!
This puppet will help him win the NOBEL in a diabolical two-step process. STEP ONE: Convince the Nobel to add “Geology.” Step TWO: Nominate HAZen and team. To do this, he has a pet rock, “Rocky,” and a “pocket Darwin.” WE totally got this.
Mineral Evolution
At a Christmas party in 2006, the biophysicist Harold Morowitz asked (The real) 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,[27][28] 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.[29]
Based on a review of the literature, Hazen and his co-authors 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.[30]). They predicted that there was a systematic increase in the number of mineral species over time, and identified three main eras of change: 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, particularly the addition of oxygen to the atmosphere.[31][32][33][34][35] This paper was followed over the next few years by several studies concentrating on one chemical element at a time and mapping out the first appearances of minerals involving each element.[36] - FROM WIKIPEDIA
“ There is no Nobel Prize category for Geology. WTF! Geology rocks!”
Robert Miller Hazen (born November 1, 1948) is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist. He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States. Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.
He has a course called The Origin of Life that is incredible.
No PrOMO, I just like it.