Carbon Mineral Challenge

The Carbon Mineral Challenge is a citizen science project dedicated to accelerating the discovery of carbon-bearing minerals. The program launched in 2015 with sponsorship from the Deep Carbon Observatory. The project will end after 2019.

Mineralogist Robert Hazen and his colleagues pioneered the concept of mineral evolution to explain how life and geology have intertwined throughout Earth’s multi-billion year past. As part of that research, the group developed a model that combines the locations and distributions of known minerals to predict the number of unknown carbon minerals on Earth. The method is similar to statistical methods used in biology. Hazen and his group predicted that 145 carbon minerals remain undiscovered on Earth.

A paper supporting the research, "Carbon Mineral Ecology," was published by American Mineralogist in 2015, and the Carbon Mineral Challenge was announced in 2015 at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting meeting in San Francisco. Geochemist Daniel Hummer (Southern Illinois University) is the project lead.

Carbon is the focus of the project due to the element's importance to life on Earth and how little is known about it.

The research behind the Carbon Mineral Challenge is based on a type of analysis called Large Number of Rare Events (LNRE) modeling. To arrive at their total of 145 previously undescribed carbon minerals, Hazen and his colleagues, including mathematician Grethe Hystad of Purdue University-Calumet, focused on diversity-distribution realtionships of the 403 known carbon-bearing minerals. Using 82,922 mineral species and locality data tabulated in mindat.org (as of 1 January 2015), the researchers found that all carbon-bearing minerals, as well as subsets containing carbon with hydrogen, calcium, sodium, or oxygen, conform to LNRE distributions. This method of analysis is often used in microbiology to estimate new species.

Hazen likens this method of modeling to reading a book. “Some words you read over and over throughout, such as ‘and’ and ‘the.’ These common words are everywhere and easy to spot," says Hazen. "On the other hand, there are words that may appear only one or two times in an entire book. Earth’s missing minerals are like these rare words; we haven’t found them yet because they formed only in very few places and in very small quantities.”

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