How Do We Use Minerals

We use things made from rocks and minerals every day. It is estimated that every person in the United States will use more than 3 million pounds of rocks, minerals and metals during their lifetime.

900 pounds of lead
700 pounds of zinc
1,300 pounds of copper
3,600 pounds of bauxite (aluminum)
30,000 pounds of ore

twenty,000 pounds of clay
28,000 pounds of common salt
1,500,000 pounds of rock, sand, and gravel
half dozen,500 pounds of cement
82,000 gallons of petroleum.

As each of us use the Earth's natural resource on a homo fourth dimension scale, information technology is important to consider that mineral resources form on geologic timescales, and the vast departure between the 2. The items in this example are only a few of the ways that nosotros utilize rocks and minerals in our everyday lives.

Images © UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Production of this gallery was generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation.

EVERYDAY USES OF ROCKS AND MINERALS

	Gypsum, chalk, and slate Gypsum is ubiquitous in our lives as the basis for drywall. It contains water in its mineral structure, which it loses when heated, providing an initial line of defense against building fires. In the fourth dimension before dry-erase boards, all education relied upon chalkboards made from slate, which is dirt that has been cooked by heat and pressure deep within the earth. Chalk is a limestone made of the skeletons of millions of microbes that in one case lived at the bottom of the sea , so it's really a fossil.
	Dirt Mudstone Ceramics, from unproblematic constitute pots to extravagant porcelain, are made from dirt mudstone. That'south just a rock that forms from the compaction of mud. If it's buried deep enough, information technology becomes slate.
	Granite, Common salt, Quartz, and Marble Granite and marble counter tops are made from stone. Granite forms when magma cools within the earth and never erupts from a volcano. The slower it cools, the larger the mineral grains that class. Marble is formed from limestone that is cooked past heat and pressure within the earth. Salt is a mineral formed from the elements sodium and chlorine, each of which is deadly on its ain. Together they make an essential nutrient. Nigh salt is formed by the evaporation of bounding main water. Sea salt is made from the evaporation of seawater today, while regular salt is mined from ancient deposits created when seawater evaporated during warm intervals in the past. Glass is formed by melting quartz, the primary mineral found in sand. Sand is all that's left over later on granite is ground down by streams, rivers, and the action of ocean waves. As the mineral quartz, silica is very hard, which is why it stays intact in sand, fifty-fifty as all of the other minerals from granite are destroyed. When it's melted into glass, information technology loses its mineral strength, only becomes clearer and can be formed while it'south molten.
	Sulfur and Flintstone Sulfur is plant as an chemical element in nature, and is an integral part of gunpowder, which creates the explosive potential in fireworks and was once used in the propellant of bullets. Sulfur is also integral to matches, one of the nearly consequent ways to start a burn down. Fires tin can also exist started with flints and steel, illustrated here. Flint is a form of quartz that forms as nodules in limestones.
	Garnet and Talc Garnet is a gemstone composed of metals (calcium, magnesium, atomic number 26, aluminum, and/or chromium) bonded to silica. It has a relatively high hardness, harder than silica sand, and so small grains are used equally an abrasive for both sand blasting and in sand paper. In contrast, talc, used in baby powder, is a very soft mineral. Information technology is composed of magnesium and silica, bonded with water, then information technology has some of the same elements as garnet, merely the organisation of its mineral structure makes it very weak -- hence its softness. Soapstone is composed primarily of talc.
	Pumice and Obsidian The rocks on this shelf are produced by volcanic eruptions. Obsidian forms when lava cools very quickly, forming natural drinking glass. It can be broken to produce extremely hard, sharp edges, which many cultures accept used for projectiles and knives. Fifty-fifty today, some surgical scalpels are made from obsidian, equally seen at the lower correct of the image. Pumice is also formed by rapid cooling of lava. In this example, the lava is cooling as dissolved gasses are escaping, creating a big number of frozen bubbles in its construction. Imagine freezing a shaken-upward cola equally it foams out of the bottle. Pumice is used as an abrasive, illustrated here by pre-faded jeans, weathered by rubbing with pumice, and Lava brand soap, which includes pumice every bit a scouring agent for cleaning extra-muddy hands.
	Copper and Zinc Copper is used in the industry of electrical wire, copper pipes for h2o, copper cookware, and in the reckoner you're using to view this web gallery. Copper has depression resistance to electrical charge and is relatively abundant, compared to its elemental sisters, gold and silver, which is why it'southward used for wiring. It can be establish both in its elemental land and as an ore, in which the copper is bonded to other elements. Zinc has been reported as benign in shortening the elapsing of mutual colds, so it is oft included in over the counter cold remedies. There have been no conclusive results supporting this use, only zinc is an essential element, then taking it as a supplement in reasonable doses cannot take any agin effects. Zinc is ofttimes constitute naturally in sphalerite, a mineral including sulfur and iron. Zinc is also used for galvanizing, because it is relatively inert compared to steel, so it can prevent rusting when used equally a coating.
	Iron and Aluminum It'due south difficult not to experience iron and aluminum in our everyday lives. Iron ores are usually compounds of iron and oxygen, otherwise known every bit rust. Much of these ores were formed when the earliest photosynthesizing microbes began to pump oxygen into the earth's oceans. In a way, iron ores are fossils, so all iron and steel we use are fabricated from fossils. Iron is commonly used in dissimilar compound with carbon and silicon. Different ratios of the other elements decide its physical backdrop, which vary betwixt cast iron, as in the frying pan, and steel, equally in the reusable java cup. Aluminum is institute naturally equally bauxite, fabricated of aluminum bonded with water. Purifying bauxite used to exist expensive and slow, so aluminum was a rare and valuable metal in the 18th and 19th centuries. That'southward why the peak of the Washington monument was covered in aluminum -- it was like covering information technology in silvery! Since the late 1880s, aluminum ore has been purified using electricity, and it has become inexpensive and plentiful. Benjamin Franklin would think we all live like kings if he knew that we casually potable out of aluminum cans and use aluminum foil to save our leftovers.
	Silvery and Gilded This shelf features silver and gold, sister elements to copper. On the periodic table they're all in the same column, and that reflects the like structures of their atoms, which give them similar chemic properties. They're all skillful conductors of both rut and electricity. Gilded and silver are really better conductors than copper, which is why they're used in high-end electronic devices, like jail cell phones and some audio equipment. They're rarer than copper, as well, which is why gold and silverish jewelry is more valuable and why they're used more ofttimes for ornament than for their electric properties. Gold is nigh oftentimes found as a pure chemical element in nature, but silver is frequently found both in its pure form and in ores.
	Mercury and Pb This shelf features mercury and atomic number 82, two important dense metals. Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, which is why it has been used for so long in thermometers. Equally the metal expands and contracts in response to the temperature, it moves up and down the thin tube, and assuasive the temperature to be read. Elemental mercury is poisonous, producing mental and coordination problems, so people have moved abroad from mercury thermometers and other everyday uses. Mercury is not plant as a pure element in nature. Information technology is mined from mercury ores, such as cinnabar (also called vermilion). Cinnabar is composed of mercury and sulfur and has been used as a red pigment since ancient times. Lead is a very dumbo, very soft metal and has a low melting point, which allows it to be easily formed. Its density and easy of forming have made it the about common metallic for bullets since the origin of firearms. It has also been used for fishing weights, equally illustrated here. Its density is so cracking that it is used as a radiation shield. We about often run across it in dentists' offices in the lead apron we wear to protect us from X-rays, only information technology is also used to shield nuclear reactors because it can capture any stray radiations before it enters the surroundings. Pb is, like mercury, poisonous, so information technology is beginning to autumn out of everyday use. Its about mutual use today is in the lead-acrid batteries plant in automobiles. Lead is establish in nature nearly often every bit galena, a chemical compound with sulfur.
	Limestone, Sand, and Gravel The concrete that makes up nigh of the urban landscape is actually an artificial reconstruction of a naturally occurring rock, conglomerate. To make concrete, we mix sand and gravel, with cement. Cement is created by heating ground limestone with other minerals. When hot enough, the limestone releases carbon dioxide and becomes quicklime, the master ingredient in cement. When the quicklime in cement reacts with water, information technology forms a stable crystal: this is what happens when physical 'dries'. The process of making cement from limestone releases carbon dioxide, consequently, the cement industry is second just to power production in the release of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere.
	Oil When we describe oil and coal as fossil fuels, we mean it: they are produced by the cooking of decomposed plant and fauna affair deep in the earth's crust over many millions of years. Fossil fuels are a form of solar power: they are energy from the sun trapped by plants millions of years ago. Oil is formed in oil shales, just once information technology becomes liquid it tends to rise until information technology is trapped in a porous reservoir rock, similar the ones shown here. Drilling into the reservoirs releases the oil for human use. Finding oil is a tricky proposition, combining the science of geology with the art of imagining where the oil would flow within the crust.
	Coal and Graphite Coal is simply the remains of woody plants that died in swampy atmospheric condition and was cooked down into a solid mass. Large amounts of wood accumulated on globe during the Carboniferous period, 359 to 299 million years ago, because plants evolved forest and no organisms on globe evolved the ability to digest wood for 50 to 60 million years! Call back of a earth where tree trunks never decompose because there are no microbes that know how to interruption them down. That'southward the Carboniferous globe that left us with a legacy of coal. Graphite is elemental carbon, merely like diamond. The difference is that diamond forms at extremely high pressures, which cause the carbon atoms to line upwardly in a strong mineral. Graphite is formed under much lower pressures and has a mineral construction that makes it slippery and easy to break. We utilize it for the 'lead' in pencils because it makes a good, merely erasable, mark. Nosotros also use it as a powder for lubrication. Both coal and graphite are equanimous primarily of carbon.
	Petroleum Products Here we see some of the many products fabricated from petroleum, or rough oil. Oil is used as a motorcar lubricant, as with the 10W-40 oil. All of the rubber and plastics hither are made from oil, including the gas can. The gas tin also represents gasoline, the ubiquitous fuel that is refined from crude oil. Diesel fuel is also refined from crude oil. Some scientists have suggested that future generations will be amazed that we burned so much of our oil as fuel, instead of using it for more permanent applications like plastics. Try to recollect of a day in your life without plastic.