THE CARBON MINERAL CHALLENGE: A LOOK BACK ON A FOUR-YEAR EXPERIMENT IN BIG DATA MINERALOGY

The Carbon Mineral Challenge, a first-of-its-kind worldwide collaboration, asked mineralogists and mineral collectors the world over to help find 145 “missing” carbon minerals. These minerals were predicted to exist based on new data analysis techniques in the field of mineral ecology¹, which takes large databases of mineral occurrences and asks “what minerals should exist on Earth, and where might we find them?” Mineral ecology has made it possible to estimate the total number of unique mineral species on Earth, the number of species in subsets of the mineral kingdom, and the potential identities and locations of minerals that remain undiscovered. Since the Challenge launched at the December 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, 30 new carbon-bearing mineral species have been accepted by the International Mineralogical Association and catalogued at mineralchallenge.net. The newly discovered minerals belong to many distinct mineral groups and highlight the extreme geochemical diversity of carbon. September 2019 marks the end of the Carbon Mineral Challenge, and this presentation will summarize our findings to date. Who found these minerals and where? What do they look like? How have these minerals evaded discovery for so long? And how do these findings compare with the initial predictions from mineral ecology?¹