ERS111H5S Lecture 4: Minerals Full
Document Summary
The substance must exist under a solid state. Must be naturally occurring on earth, not man-made. Must be inorganic, not coming from living or made by things. Must have a fixed chemical formula, made out of specific elements. The atoms that make up the substance has to be arranged in an orderly struc. People say that ice has the 5 criterion but still not considered a mineral. Result from the mineral"s internal arrangement of atoms. When minerals combine in nature, we get rocks. Mineral != crystal, there is a lot of overlapping however. Crystals have a repeated atomic structure -- the crystal lattice (think bricks in a hou. Some minerals lack this -- they are not are not crystals. It is a single continuous piece of crystalline solid typically bounded by flat surfaces, called that grow naturally as the mineral forms. The word comes from the greek krystallos, meaning ice.