What Are Three Ways That Minerals Are Used?

We apply things fabricated from rocks and minerals every day. It is estimated that every person in the U.s.a. will employ more than than three million pounds of rocks, minerals and metals during their lifetime.

900 pounds of atomic number 82
700 pounds of zinc
1,300 pounds of copper
iii,600 pounds of bauxite (aluminum)
thirty,000 pounds of ore

xx,000 pounds of clay
28,000 pounds of table salt
ane,500,000 pounds of rock, sand, and gravel
6,500 pounds of cement
82,000 gallons of petroleum.

As each of us use the Earth'south natural resources on a man time calibration, it is important to consider that mineral resources form on geologic timescales, and the vast difference between the two. The items in this case are just a few of the means that we utilise rocks and minerals in our everyday lives.

Images © UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Product of this gallery was generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation.

EVERYDAY USES OF ROCKS AND MINERALS

	Gypsum, chalk, and slate Gypsum is ubiquitous in our lives as the basis for drywall. Information technology contains h2o in its mineral structure, which it loses when heated, providing an initial line of defense confronting building fires. In the time before dry-erase boards, all education relied upon chalkboards made from slate, which is clay that has been cooked by estrus and pressure deep inside the earth. Chalk is a limestone made of the skeletons of millions of microbes that one time lived at the bottom of the ocean , so it'south really a fossil.
	Clay Mudstone Ceramics, from simple plant pots to extravagant porcelain, are made from clay mudstone. That'southward simply a rock that forms from the compaction of mud. If it's cached deep enough, information technology becomes slate.
	Granite, Common salt, Quartz, and Marble Granite and marble counter tops are made from stone. Granite forms when magma cools inside the world and never erupts from a volcano. The slower it cools, the larger the mineral grains that form. Marble is formed from limestone that is cooked by estrus and pressure inside the globe. Salt is a mineral formed from the elements sodium and chlorine, each of which is deadly on its own. Together they make an essential nutrient. Virtually common salt is formed by the evaporation of sea water. Sea salt is made from the evaporation of seawater today, while regular salt is mined from ancient deposits created when seawater evaporated during warm intervals in the past. Drinking glass is formed by melting quartz, the main mineral found in sand. Sand is all that's left over subsequently granite is ground downward by streams, rivers, and the activity of ocean waves. As the mineral quartz, silica is very hard, which is why it stays intact in sand, even every bit all of the other minerals from granite are destroyed. When it's melted into glass, it loses its mineral forcefulness, merely becomes clearer and can be formed while it's molten.
	Sulfur and Flint Sulfur is found as an element in nature, and is an integral role of gunpowder, which creates the explosive potential in fireworks and was once used in the propellant of bullets. Sulfur is besides integral to matches, one of the most consequent ways to get-go a fire. Fires can too exist started with flints and steel, illustrated here. Flint is a form of quartz that forms equally nodules in limestones.
	Garnet and Talc Garnet is a gemstone equanimous of metals (calcium, magnesium, iron, aluminum, and/or chromium) bonded to silica. It has a relatively high hardness, harder than silica sand, so small grains are used as an annoying for both sand blasting and in sand paper. In dissimilarity, talc, used in baby pulverization, is a very soft mineral. It is composed of magnesium and silica, bonded with water, and so information technology has some of the same elements as garnet, but the organisation of its mineral structure makes information technology very weak -- hence its softness. Soapstone is composed primarily of talc.
	Pumice and Obsidian The rocks on this shelf are produced by volcanic eruptions. Obsidian forms when lava cools very rapidly, forming natural glass. Information technology can be broken to produce extremely hard, precipitous edges, which many cultures have used for projectiles and knives. Even today, some surgical scalpels are fabricated from obsidian, as seen at the lower correct of the epitome. Pumice is besides formed by rapid cooling of lava. In this case, the lava is cooling as dissolved gasses are escaping, creating a large number of frozen bubbles in its structure. Imagine freezing a shaken-up cola equally it foams out of the bottle. Pumice is used as an abrasive, illustrated here by pre-faded jeans, weathered by rubbing with pumice, and Lava brand soap, which includes pumice as a scouring agent for cleaning actress-muddied hands.
	Copper and Zinc Copper is used in the manufacture of electric wire, copper pipes for water, copper cookware, and in the computer you lot're using to view this spider web gallery. Copper has low resistance to electrical charge and is relatively abundant, compared to its elemental sisters, gold and silverish, which is why it'due south used for wiring. Information technology tin can be found both in its elemental state and equally an ore, in which the copper is bonded to other elements. Zinc has been reported as beneficial in shortening the elapsing of common colds, then it is often included in over the counter cold remedies. There accept been no conclusive results supporting this employ, only zinc is an essential chemical element, so taking information technology equally a supplement in reasonable doses cannot have whatsoever adverse furnishings. Zinc is frequently institute naturally in sphalerite, a mineral including sulfur and fe. Zinc is also used for galvanizing, because it is relatively inert compared to steel, so it tin prevent rusting when used as a coating.
	Atomic number 26 and Aluminum It's hard non to feel fe and aluminum in our everyday lives. Atomic number 26 ores are unremarkably compounds of iron and oxygen, otherwise known as rust. Much of these ores were formed when the earliest photosynthesizing microbes began to pump oxygen into the earth'due south oceans. In a style, iron ores are fossils, then all iron and steel nosotros utilize are made from fossils. Iron is usually used in unlike chemical compound with carbon and silicon. Dissimilar ratios of the other elements decide its concrete backdrop, which vary between bandage fe, as in the frying pan, and steel, equally in the reusable coffee cup. Aluminum is found naturally every bit bauxite, made of aluminum bonded with water. Purifying bauxite used to be expensive and slow, so aluminum was a rare and valuable metal in the 18th and 19th centuries. That'south why the top of the Washington monument was covered in aluminum -- it was similar covering it in silver! Since the belatedly 1880s, aluminum ore has been purified using electricity, and it has become cheap and plentiful. Benjamin Franklin would recall we all alive similar kings if he knew that we casually drink out of aluminum cans and use aluminum foil to salve our leftovers.
	Silver and Golden This shelf features argent and gilded, sister elements to copper. On the periodic table they're all in the same column, and that reflects the similar structures of their atoms, which give them like chemical backdrop. They're all good conductors of both rut and electricity. Gold and silver are actually amend conductors than copper, which is why they're used in high-end electronic devices, like prison cell phones and some audio equipment. They're rarer than copper, too, which is why gold and silverish jewelry is more than valuable and why they're used more than ofttimes for decoration than for their electrical backdrop. Gilt is most oft plant as a pure element in nature, but silver is ofttimes found both in its pure form and in ores.
	Mercury and Lead This shelf features mercury and lead, two important dense metals. Mercury is the but metallic that is liquid at room temperature, which is why it has been used for and then long in thermometers. As the metallic expands and contracts in response to the temperature, information technology moves upward and downward the thin tube, and assuasive the temperature to exist read. Elemental mercury is poisonous, producing mental and coordination bug, and so people take moved away from mercury thermometers and other everyday uses. Mercury is not plant as a pure element in nature. It is mined from mercury ores, such every bit cinnabar (also called vermilion). Cinnabar is composed of mercury and sulfur and has been used as a ruddy pigment since ancient times. Lead is a very dumbo, very soft metal and has a low melting point, which allows it to be easily formed. Its density and easy of forming take made it the most mutual metal for bullets since the origin of firearms. Information technology has likewise been used for fishing weights, as illustrated here. Its density is and so bang-up that information technology is used as a radiation shield. We most often see it in dentists' offices in the lead apron we wear to protect us from X-rays, but it is also used to shield nuclear reactors considering it can capture any stray radiation earlier information technology enters the environment. Lead is, like mercury, poisonous, so it is beginning to fall out of everyday apply. Its nigh common use today is in the pb-acrid batteries institute in automobiles. Pb is found in nature nigh frequently equally galena, a compound with sulfur.
	Limestone, Sand, and Gravel The concrete that makes up most of the urban landscape is actually an artificial reconstruction of a naturally occurring stone, conglomerate. To brand physical, we mix sand and gravel, with cement. Cement is created by heating ground limestone with other minerals. When hot enough, the limestone releases carbon dioxide and becomes quicklime, the primary ingredient in cement. When the quicklime in cement reacts with h2o, it forms a stable crystal: this is what happens when concrete 'dries'. The process of making cement from limestone releases carbon dioxide, consequently, the cement industry is second merely to power production in the release of carbon dioxide gas into the temper.
	Oil When we describe oil and coal as fossil fuels, we mean it: they are produced past the cooking of decomposed constitute and animal matter deep in the earth's chaff over many millions of years. Fossil fuels are a form of solar power: they are energy from the sun trapped by plants millions of years ago. Oil is formed in oil shales, merely once information technology becomes liquid information technology tends to rise until it is trapped in a porous reservoir stone, similar the ones shown here. Drilling into the reservoirs releases the oil for human use. Finding oil is a tricky proffer, combining the scientific discipline of geology with the art of imagining where the oil would menstruation within the crust.
	Coal and Graphite Coal is just the remains of woody plants that died in swampy conditions and was cooked down into a solid mass. Large amounts of forest accumulated on globe during the Carboniferous catamenia, 359 to 299 meg years ago, because plants evolved wood and no organisms on earth evolved the ability to digest wood for fifty to lx million years! Call up of a world where tree trunks never decompose considering there are no microbes that know how to intermission them down. That'due south the Carboniferous globe that left us with a legacy of coal. Graphite is elemental carbon, just like diamond. The departure is that diamond forms at extremely loftier pressures, which cause the carbon atoms to line upwards in a stiff mineral. Graphite is formed under much lower pressures and has a mineral construction that makes it slippery and piece of cake to break. We use it for the 'atomic number 82' in pencils considering it makes a skillful, only erasable, mark. We also use information technology as a pulverization for lubrication. Both coal and graphite are equanimous primarily of carbon.
	Petroleum Products Hither nosotros run into some of the many products fabricated from petroleum, or rough oil. Oil is used as a automobile lubricant, as with the 10W-40 oil. All of the prophylactic and plastics hither are made from oil, including the gas tin. The gas can also represents gasoline, the ubiquitous fuel that is refined from crude oil. Diesel fuel is also refined from crude oil. Some scientists accept suggested that future generations will be amazed that we burned so much of our oil as fuel, instead of using information technology for more permanent applications like plastics. Try to recollect of a twenty-four hours in your life without plastic.