[1] Climate forcing by mineral dust aerosols is one of the most uncertain processes in our current understanding of climate change. The main natural sources of dust aerosols are blowing dust, dust devils, and dust storms. Electric fields larger than 100 kV/m have been measured in these phenomena. Theoretical calculations and laboratory experiments show that these electric fields produce electri...

The sequestration of carbon and nitrogen by clay-sized particles in soils is well established, and clay content or mineral surface area has been used to estimate the sequestration potential of soils. Here, via incubation of a sieved (<2 mm) topsoil with labelled litter, we find that only some of the clay-sized surfaces bind organic matter (OM). Surprisingly, <19% of the visible mineral areas sh...

"Biomimetic" approaches for heterogeneous growth of inorganic coatings have become particularly widespread in biomedical applications, where calcium phosphate (CaP) mineral coatings are used to improve biomedical implants. Changes in coating properties can influence the effects of mineral coatings on adjacent cells, but to date it has not been practical to systematically vary inorganic coating ...

The different types of mineral industries wastes are characterized. Total tonnage in the world of finely ground wastes from i.a. flotation and leaching operations amounts to around 1 500 million tons per annum. The major environmental problems arise from slowly settling fine particles, dissolved metal ions and chemicals retained in the effluent. The paper discusses the toxic effects of dissolve...

Accessible surface areas (ASAs) of individual rock-forming minerals exert a fundamental control on the maximum mineral reactivity with formation fluids. Notably, ASA efficiency during fluid-rock reactions can vary by orders magnitude, depending inflow fluid chemistry and velocity field. Due to lack adequate quantification methods, determining mineral-specific ASAs their reaction still remain ex...

Mineral dust aerosols emitted from the Earth crust during various natural and anthropogenic processes continuously alter the chemical balance of the atmosphere via heterogeneous processes and thus, impact on the global climate. Understanding of heterogeneous chemistry and photochemistry on mineral dust has become vital to accurately predict the effect of mineral dust loading on the Earth’s atmo...

Sun, H., Nelson, M., Chen, F. and Husch, J. 2009. Soil mineral structural water loss during loss on ignition analyses. Can. J. Soil Sci. 89: 603 610. Water loss from soil minerals has been known to cause errors in the determination of soil organic matter when the loss on ignition (LOI) method is used. Unfortunately, no known published studies reliably quantify the range of structural water in t...