DATA VISUALIZATION IN MINERAL EVOLUTION STUDIES (Invited Presentation)

The study of mineral evolution provides us new ways to observe the physical, chemical, and biological processes in mineral formation. In recent years, our colleagues at the University of Arizona have been developing the Mineral Evolution Database (MED), in which age (e.g., first occurrence and last occurrence) and locality attributes are added to mineral species. Using that database, we have developed a few data visualizations to show relationships between elements and minerals (Ma et al., 2017) and patterns in minerals’ evolution history. We are currently working on two new case studies: The first work is to show some detailed relationship between elements and minerals. We will retrieve the presence and absence data from element-mineral co-relationship data from MED. A Chi-square test will be applied to further see the impact of a third element on the mineral species of two other elements. Then this result can be visualized in a 3D matrix. The second work is a paleogeographic map of mineral species. The idea is to reuse the service of GPlate’s paleogeographic map reconstruction to show the location of various mineral species when they first occur on the Earth. Several data visualization components, such as the periodic table and the geologic time scale, will be deployed in this work to create a friendly interface for the end user to search data. Our aim is to create open and sustainable tools that can be used by the community in mineralogy research and education.

Reference

Ma, X., Hummer, D., Golden, J.J., Fox, P.A., Hazen, R.M., Morrison, S.M., Downs, R.T., Madhikarmi, B.L., Wang, C., Meyer, M.B., 2017. Using Visual Exploratory Data Analysis to Facilitate Collaboration and Hypothesis Generation in Cross-Disciplinary Research. International Journal of Geo-Information 6 (11), 368.