Clay Minerals at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum: Interpretations, Limits, and Perspectives

Quantitative Thermal Analysis of Clay Minerals

Vold's mathematical analysis of the d.t.a, curve has been applied to Murray's data on the dehydration of clays. Owing to experimental uncertainties, values for the heats of dehydration are lower than those determined by other methods. The first ruder law is obeyed and the activation energies of dehydration are of the same order as those derived from isothermal data; rates of dehydration are, ho...

Clay Minerals and Catalysis

More than half a century ago, Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal and Swiss geochemist Victor M. Goldschmidt independently proposed that clay minerals may have played an important role in prebiotic synthesis (Bernal 1949; Goldschmidt 1952). I concur that mineral catalysis must have had a central role in prebiotic synthesis because most uncatalyzed reactions start from simple precursors like hyd...

Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) has been associated with the release of several thousands of petagrams of carbon (PgC) as methane and/or carbon dioxide into the ocean-atmosphere system within ~10 kyr, on the basis of the co-occurrence of a carbon isotope excursion (CIE), widespread dissolution of deep sea carbonates, and global warming. In theory, this rapid carbon release should ha...

Thermal Analysis: A Complementary Method to Study the Shurijeh Clay Minerals

Clay minerals are considered the most important components of clastic reservoir rock evaluation studies. The Shurijeh gas reservoir Formation, represented by shaly sandstones of the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous age, is the main reservoir rock in the Eastern Kopet-Dagh sedimentary Basin, NE Iran. In this study, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopic (S...

Clay and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry