Comparing Earth And Mars, New Study Shows How Mineral Diversity Is Controlled By Plate Tectonics And Emergence Of Life

More than 6,000 different minerals are known to exist on Earth, but after more than 50 years of investigations, only 161 minerals have been found on Mars—a dramatically lower number for a planet that shares much in common (like average chemical composition) with our own.

The difference, according to a new study, has arisen because minerals on Mars have had fewer pathways to form compared with those on Earth, as Mars lacks two important factors contributing to the formation of minerals: plate tectonics and life-forms.

Whereas earlier work identified 57 primary and secondary mineral-forming mechanisms on Earth, the new study identified just 20 modes of mineral formation on Mars.

Early in the planets’ histories, minerals on Earth and Mars formed in similar ways. For instance, the first minerals on both planets likely crystallized directly from cooling magma or formed under high pressure conditions as experienced during a meteorite impact. Tectonic and hydrothermal activity likely also led to many new minerals after a first stable crust and oceans formed on each planet. But then the mineralogical paths of Mars and Earth diverged.

Unlike Earth, Mars is today a geologically dormant world. Its small size meant that plenty of its internal energy–generated by radioactive decay and by leftover heat from its primordial formation–escaped into space long ago, and the currents of partially molten rock that drive plate tectonics on Earth would have shut down long ago.

Without plate tectonics, Mars lacks the pressure and temperature conditions needed to form many common metamorphic minerals like kyanite and garnet. Plate tectonics also constantly remixes elements forming new chemical combinations and minerals.

And unlike Mars, where conditions for life as we know it maybe existed during the first billion years, Earth’s biodiversity significantly increased over time.

“One third of Earth’s minerals could not have formed without biology, ” explains study lead author Robert Hazen. Minerals like apatite and calcite are found in shells and bones of many animals, but even more important, by creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere on Earth more than 2 billion years ago the activity of microbes led to 2,000 minerals that wouldn’t have formed otherwise.

Even today animals can add to the mineralogical diversity of Earth.

The mineral spheniscidite forms only when the urine of penguins (order Sphenisciformes, hence the mineral name) reacts with clay minerals beneath a rookery on Elephant Island in the British Antarctic Territory. A survey published in 2017 identified 600 new minerals derived from recent human activities.

The study “On the Diversity and Formation Modes of Martian Minerals” was published in the journal Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets (2023). Additional material provided by Rachel Fritts for the American Geophysical Union.

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