Cosmic mineralogy: from diamonds to quasicrystals

Abstract: The mineralogy of our planet is a fingerprint of history—a durable archive of the physical and chemical conditions that have evolved over 4.5 billion years. Minerals record temperatures and pressures, redox states and fluid compositions, preserving evidence that spans the earliest violent collisions of solar-system formation to human activities that occurred only yesterday. Yet Earth’s mineral story reaches far deeper in time, extending back to the very origins of the elements themselves.
This talk traces mineral evolution from the formation of the most rudimentary elements in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, through the birth of the first stars and the onset of stellar nucleosynthesis, to the creation of the heaviest elements in kilonova explosions. These elements were dispersed into interstellar gas clouds, recycled through multiple generations of stars, and ultimately assembled into planets. The first minerals to form in the universe—diamond and graphite—were forged under extreme conditions and endlessly recycled, providing the elemental backbone for life. Today, roughly 6,000 mineral species are known on Earth; each one offers a distinct window into our cosmic history.