The oldest fossils found thus far on Earth are c. 3.49- and 3.46-billion-year-old filamentous and coccoidal microbial remains in rocks of the Pilbara craton, Western Australia, and c. 3.4-billion-year-old rocks from the Barberton region, South Africa. Their biogenicity was recently questioned and they were reinterpreted as contaminants, mineral artefacts or inorganic carbon aggregates. Morpholo...

[1] Raman spectroscopy is a powerful tool for mineral characterization and for detection of water and organic and inorganic forms of carbon. The Mars microbeam Raman spectrometer (MMRS) is designed for close-up analysis of rocks and soils in planetary surface exploration. The MMRS consists of a probe (in a flight unit to be deployed by a robotic arm) and a spectrograph, laser source, and electr...

The Late Devonian to Early Mississippian is an important metallogenic epoch within the Canadian cordillera resulting in the production of significant sediment exhalative massive sulphide (SEDEX) and volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) mineral occurrences within rocks of cratonic or pericratonic affinity. Major belts include the Late Devonian Earn-hosted SEDEX deposits of the Selwyn and Gataga d...

Geomagnetic study was carried out to investigate the distribution and depth of formations of different magnetic rocks on an old quarry site, Abeokuta, Southwestern, Nigeria. Eight ground magnetic profiles were established with 10 m spacing intervals orientated in West-East and North-South directions, and ranged between 110 and 190 m. A total of 223 data sets were acquired and corrected for all ...

The present study deals with heavy mineral analysis of late Early Miocene marine sediments recovered in the McMurdo Sound region (Ross Sea, Antarctica) during the ANDRILL— SMS Project in 2007. The main objective is to investigate how heavy mineral assemblages reflect different source rocks and hence different provenance areas. These data contribute to a better understanding of East Antarctica i...

Introduction: Building upon our previous work on an automated mineral classifier [1], we are working to extend its functionality towards classification of rocks. The current work focuses on building an automated classifier using Raman spectral data to identify key minerals contained in igneous rocks. The ability to identify minerals in igneous rock samples provides inportant information on thei...

SINCE Cross, Iddings, Pirsson, and Washington 09o3) first published their system of deriving normative minerals from chemical analyses, the CIPW norm has been successfully used to identify, compare, and classify trends in igneous rocks with similar or differing mineral compositions. The norm has been used for metamorphic rocks and rocks of somewhat uncertain mode of origin (Bowes, ~967). Variou...

It typically occurs as an alteration product at the contact between felsic and mafic or ultramafic rocks such as pyroxenites and dunites. It also occurs in carbonatites and metamorphosed magenesium rich limestone. Associated mineral phases include: corundum, apatite, serpentine and talc. It occurs interlayered with chlorite, biotite and phlogopite.[2] Vermiculite Wikipedia, the free encyclopedi...