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User Tip #1 You can access Webmineral's extensive mineral
help files
by clicking on this ( When this icon appears, they link directly to
the particular topic (eg.
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Factoid #2 The Mineralogical Society of American (MSA) was founded in 1919. "Membership in the Society is open to any person interested in mineralogy and related sciences regardless of residence or citizenship." If you are interested in joining, just follow the instructions on this link. |
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User Tip #3 Many short-cut features are offered on alphabetical (A
to Z) index of mineral species. |
User Tip #4 Many short-cut features are offered on alphabetical (A
to Z) index of mineral species. |
User Tip #5 Many short-cut features are offered on alphabetical (A
to Z) index of mineral species. |
Factoid #6 Sulfur, a common industrial chemical, is produced as a by-product from the desulfurization of petroleum products such as crude oils or natural gas. The mining of primary sulfur deposits is no longer the most important source of this element. |
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Factoid #7 The 4 largest mineral shows in the world are: |
User Tip #8 Webmineral can be machine translated into many different languages (eg. Spanish, German, French, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) using the links on this index page. Translation services provided by Babel Fish and InterTran. |
Factoid #9
Webmineral was registered with the Internet Content Ratings Association (ICRA) as containing content which is suitable for kids of all ages. Because the ICRA disbanded, I left this here to assure users that nothing has changed and webmineral.com is still suitable for kids of all ages. |
Factoid #10 All hard (Mohs > 4), non-conductive minerals that lack
a crystallographic center-of-symmetry exhibit
the property of piezoelectricity.
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Search Tip #11 For the best results when searching for chemical
elements using Webmineral's search
engine, follow these rules: |
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Factoid #12 At last count, Webmineral has identified at least 85 minerals
named after women. |
Factoid #13 New minerals are discovered at the rate of about 60 per
year. |
Factoid #14 Need a quick and easy mineral label for your collection? Go to the species page for the mineral of interest. Scroll down to the "See Also" section and print the label which has been already filled out with necessary data. Spaces have been added to fill out additional data for location and remarks. |
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Factoid #15 Aluminum metal was so hard to refine from it's ores that Emperor Napoleon III of France reserved the use of aluminum cutlery for state banquets; thereby, relegating gold and silver forks and spoons to lesser guests. The invention of the Hall-Héroult process of electrolytic decomposition to elemental aluminum effectively replaced the expensive Wöhler process. This eliminated the metal as a rare commodity. |
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Factoid #16 Silicon metal used in the semiconductor industry is purified to 99.9999999%. This impurity level is equivalent to 100 parts per billion (1x10-7). Using this ultra pure material, single silicon crystals up to 18 inches in diameter are grown. Slices of this starting material form the substrate on which CPU cores are fabricated. |
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User Tip #17 The mineral specimen
image library on Webmineral contains pictures of over 3,700 different species.
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Factoid #18 All the gold
mined in the past 6,000 years in the whole world would fit inside a baseball diamond (84'x84'x84')
or (25.6m,25.6m,25.6m)and
would weigh 145,000 metric tonnes. |
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User Tip #19 Need copies of webmineral.com's data on a CD-ROM? The Photographic Guide to Mineral Species - 2nd Edition contains all pages of species data along with thousands of common, rare, and unusual mineral pictures. |
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Factoid #20 What do the minerals Aegirine, Neptunite, Quetzalcoatlite, and Watatsumiite all have in common? Answer, in order, they were all named after sea gods (Teutonic, Roman, Toltec, Japanese). |
User Tip #21 Many short-cut features are offered on alphabetical (A
to Z) index of mineral species. |
Factoid #20 Webmineral.com uses a reverse chemical analysis method to calculate the chemical composition of each element. The chemical composition of each mineral is calculated by taking the published empirical formula to deconstruct the elemental composition. The derived analysis is compared to the published values to insure the empirical formula is correct and the elemental valences match the published values. This reverse look-up has spotted errors in 5% of all published data. |
Factoid #21 Violent mergers of neutron stars in binary solar systems likely are the main sources of the heaviest chemical elements in the universe. In detailed numerical simulations, the ejected matter from merging neutron stars provides ideal conditions for the relevant reactions of atomic nuclei to take place, producing the heaviest elements in the correct abundances. From Astronomy.com. On top of all this, we have the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of time approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago (Ga), during which a large number of asteroids and icy comets impacted Earth. It is this event that added significant amounts of r-process-derived heavy elements to the Earth's crust and, probably, the Earth's oceans. It looks like we owe the lead in our car batteries and gold rings on our
fingers to: |
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Icon links
a pronunciation example (.WAV file) of the mineral name courtesy of 
Icon links
a Java crystal form for the mineral, created with the program 
Icon links
a copyright image or picture of the mineral in the database which may be viewed. 
Icon links to
a picture gallery of images for that particular mineral.
The full listing of mineral images is accessed from this 
Icon links
to a sample of the 