Clay Minerals in Hydrothermal Systems

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...

Clay Minerals: Adsorbophysical Properties

The structure and features of surfaces of clay minerals (kaolin, montmorillonite, etc) have an important scientific and practical value. On the surface the interrelation of processes at electronic, atomic and molecular levels is realized. Availability of mineral surface to external influences opens wide scientific and technical opportunities of use of the surface phenomena, so the research of c...

Impact-generated Hydrothermal Alteration on Mars: Clay Minerals, Oxides, Zeolites, and More

Introduction: In the Noachian, Mars’ crust was deeply affected by impact crater gardening [1], and subsequent hydrothermal alteration. While water was present in the Martian crust [2,3], frequent impacts [4,5] provided prominent heat sources that drove hydrothermal systems. Those systems were scattered randomly over the planet’s surface and variable in size, but generally spanned the diameter o...

Distribution and Origin of Clay Minerals During Hydrothermal Alteration of Ore Deposits

Clay and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry