Relative Abundances of Mineral Species: A Statistical Measure to Characterize Earth-like Planets Based on Earth’s Mineralogy

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• 作者：Grethe Hystad ; Robert T. Downs ; Robert M. Hazen…
• 关键词：Statistical mineralogy ; Mineral frequency distribution ; Large number of rare events distribution ; Mineral ecology ; Earth ; like planets ; Mars mineralogy
• 刊名：Mathematical Geosciences
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：49
• 期：2
• 页码：179-194
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Earth and Environmental Science
• 刊物主题：Earth Sciences, general; Statistics for Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, Chemistry and Earth Sciences; Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; Hydrogeology;
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：1874-8953
• 卷排序：49

文摘

The mineral frequency distribution of Earth’s crust provides a mineralogy-based statistical measure for characterizing Earth-like planets. It has previously been shown that this distribution conforms to a generalized inverse Gauss–Poisson large number of rare events model. However, there is no known analytic expression for the probability distribution of this model; therefore, the population probabilities do not exist in closed forms. Consequently, in this paper, the population probabilities are calculated numerically for all mineral species in Earth’s crust, including the predicted undiscovered species. These population probabilities provide an estimate of the occurrence probabilities of species in a random sample of N mineral species–locality pairs. These estimates are used to characterize Earth in terms of its mineralogy. The study demonstrates that Earth is mineralogically unique in the cosmos. In spite of this uniqueness, the frequency distribution of minerals from Earth can be used to quantify the extent to which another planet is Earth-like. Quantitative criteria for characterizing Earth-like planets are given. An example, involving mineral species found on Mars by the CheMin instrument during the Mars Science Laboratory mission suggests that Mars is mineralogically similar to an Earth-like planet.