Plan you week with the help of our 10-day weather forecasts and weekend weather predictions for Seward, AK
A mineral is a naturally occurring chemical compound, usually of crystalline form and abiogenic in origin (not produced by life processes). A mineral has one specific chemical composition, whereas a rock can be an aggregate of different minerals or mineraloids. The study of minerals is called mineralogy.
Nonmetallic resources are things like sand, gravel, gypsum, halite, Uranium, dimension stone. A mineral resource is a volume of rock enriched in one or more useful materials. In this sense a mineral refers to a useful material, a definition that is different from the way we defined a mineral back in Chapter 5. Aluminum is the third most abundant mineral in the Earth's crust. 2  It occurs in the most common minerals of the crust-the feldspars (NaAlSi 3 O 8, KalSi 3 O 8, & CaAl 2 Si 2 O 8, but the cost of extracting the Aluminum from these minerals is high.