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The ten stages

Hazen and colleagues introduced the ten-stage sequence in the 2008 paper that originated mineral evolution. The sequence is cumulative — each stage opens chemical and physical regimes that were unavailable before, and new species accumulate against the stock built by earlier stages. Stages are not strict chronological divisions: they overlap, and several remain active in the present. The first six are pre-biological. The last four involve life, and account for the larger share of the present mineral inventory.

1. Primary chondritic minerals

Mineral species condensing from the solar nebula before planet formation, around 4.6 billion years ago. Approximately sixty species — refractory calcium-aluminium inclusions, chondrules, and the silicates and metal phases that make up unaltered chondritic meteorites. This is the inherited mineral inventory available to early planetary bodies.

2. Aqueous, thermal, and shock alteration of chondrites

Within planetesimals, primary minerals are altered by water, heat, and impact. Hydrated phases form, secondary minerals develop, and the count rises to around two hundred and fifty species. The mineralogy of carbonaceous chondrites in particular records this stage.

3. Igneous rock evolution on small bodies

Larger planetesimals begin to differentiate, producing the first achondrites — igneous meteorites whose mineralogy reflects melting and recrystallisation rather than condensation. The species inventory grows as fractionation produces phases that did not exist in unaltered chondritic material.

4. Initial planetary differentiation

On large bodies including the early Earth, gravitational separation produces core, mantle, and crust. Iron and siderophile elements partition into the core; silicate phases form the mantle and earliest crust. Differentiation makes new mineral phases possible by concentrating elements that were thinly distributed before.

5. Initial igneous activity

Early planetary igneous activity produces basaltic crust. The Hadean to Earliest Archean Earth carries a mineralogy dominated by mafic and ultramafic assemblages — the products of basaltic melting and crystallisation.

6. Granitoid formation and plate tectonics

Continental crust differentiates through granitoid magmatism, and plate tectonics begins to operate. New mineral-forming regimes open: hydrothermal concentration of metals into ore deposits, pegmatites carrying rare elements, and metamorphic mineralogies at convergent margins. By the end of this stage, perhaps fifteen hundred mineral species had appeared on Earth.

7. Biological influence — anoxygenic photosynthesis and banded iron formations

Life enters the mineralogical record. Anoxygenic photosynthesis, established by around 3.5 billion years ago, begins to alter the chemistry of the early ocean. Photosynthesising bacteria precipitate carbonate phases; reduced iron carried by hydrothermal vents is oxidised by biologically produced compounds and deposited as the banded iron formations — layered hematite and magnetite sediments that record the gradual biological transformation of the oceans through the late Archean and into the early Proterozoic. The surface mineralogy still reflects a largely reducing planet, but the coupling between mineralogy and biosphere is now established. From this stage forward, the mineral record is not separable from the history of life.

8. The Great Oxidation Event

Around 2.4 billion years ago, oxygenic photosynthesis raises atmospheric oxygen to a fraction of present-day levels. The effect on surface mineralogy is profound. Oxygen attacks reduced phases across the planet’s surface: ferric iron oxides and hydroxides proliferate, oxidised copper, uranium, and manganese minerals appear, and the continental weathering profile shifts from reducing to oxidising chemistry. The mineral species inventory roughly doubles during this stage. The Great Oxidation Event is, by current estimates, the single largest discrete diversification event in Earth’s mineralogical history — and it is unambiguously a biological event, produced by the metabolic output of cyanobacteria. Mineral evolution’s claim that biology and mineralogy co-evolve rests most heavily on this stage.

9. The intermediate ocean and atmosphere

Through the Proterozoic and into the Phanerozoic, ocean and atmospheric chemistry continue to evolve under biological influence. Eukaryotic life elaborates biomineralisation — calcium carbonate shells, phosphate skeletons, silica frustules — producing carbonate platforms, phosphorite deposits, and biogenic silica accumulations at scales that reshape the sedimentary record. Soil formation, driven by plants and the microbial communities they support, generates clay mineralogies and weathering profiles unique to a biosphere-bearing surface. The rate of new species addition slows compared to the Great Oxidation Event, but biology remains the dominant differentiating agent.

10. Anthropogenic mineralogy

Human activity creates mineral species that would not otherwise exist on Earth — corrosion products on industrial structures, phases formed in mine waste, synthetic compounds that meet the formal criteria for natural mineral status. Hazen and Edward Grew have documented several hundred such species, formed in contexts ranging from ancient slag heaps to active mine tailings. The stage formalises the recognition that human industrial activity is now a mineral-forming process at planetary scale.