[1] 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.
[3] 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 in San Francisco.
[6][7] The research behind the Carbon Mineral Challenge is based on a type of analysis called large number of rare events (LNRE) modeling.
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.
[8] Hazen and his colleagues continue to explore big-data mineralogy in a project called "The Co-Evolution of the Geo- and Biospheres: An Integrated Program for Data-Driven, Abductive Discovery in the Earth Sciences".
[11] The project focuses both on new discoveries in the field and analyses of samples already in storage in museums and other institutions.