DATA ANALYSIS OF TOURMALINE SUPERGROUP CRYSTAL CHEMISTRY

The tourmaline supergroup consists of borosilicate minerals with complex compositional and structural relationships. Due to its complexity, full analyses of tourmaline are challenging and often require assumptions to be made during formula normalization. Over the past 20 years tourmaline research has primarily focused on individual species, as opposed to looking at the tourmaline supergroup as a whole. For this project, we explored how compositional variations in tourmaline alter the length of the corresponding bonds. This was done through statistical and graphical analyses of tourmaline data found in the literature. By increasing the accuracy of normalization and site-occupancy determinations, we can examine the resulting data for trends in the tourmaline structure.