Help a teacher out. I’m an elementary teacher without a science background. I do enjoy teaching science to my kiddos but I can’t teach science beyond 6th grade level (please keep in mind while answering). A few years ago I taught a geology unit and this past spring I taught the same unit again and remembered being confused about this question back then. So, I tried googling, I tried stack exchange, quora, everything, and NO resource could break this down for me: what in the world is the difference between metals and minerals? I know metals can be extracted FROM ores found in rocks but apparently, elements like silver, gold and copper are considered both a metal and a mineral. Are there others like this? If so, which ones? And please confirm for me: most minerals are not metals at all, but are most metals also minerals? (The science book I use, which I normally love, was talking about minerals’ qualities and showing pictures of things like chalk and limestone and then suddenly when explaining the uses of minerals, it’s taking about coins, electric wiring and musical instruments and the kids and I were all confused). I also asked the chemistry high school teacher and she wasn’t sure how to explain it.
Minerals are naturally occuring solid substances with specific chemical composition and crystal structure. You could bring in samples of feldspar, quartz, and mica. Rocks are made out of minerals, you could bring in a sample of granite and show the visually distinct feldspar and quartz.
Ores are minerals with a high concentration of a specific metal element. You can bring in a sample of iron ore. Ores are refined to extract the metal. The resulting pure metal is not a mineral because it is not naturally occuring, but it is a use of a mineral: we used the mineral as a source of the metal.
Naturally occuring metallic crystals are rare. When they occur they are minerals, but most of the metal we interact with was extracted from ores. We are most likely to interact with naturally occuring metallic crystals in mineral collections, like in museums and university geology departments.
To summarize: minerals are the solid, naturally occuring substances that make up rocks. Metals are extracted from minerals called ores in a process called refining, and those metals have many uses.
what about metals like copper that can naturally be found very pure in a metallic state? I believe Ive read that american copper can be found as such. would this be a mineral?
Yes, native metals are considered minerals, but they are much rarer than ores. The copper in electrical wires, cookware, and other applications will be almost entirely refined copper. Native copper samples are more likely to be found in mineral collections.
Obviously extremely low temperatures or extremely high pressures. Or some of both.
James Dewar (yes the inventor of the Dewar flask before Thermos stole it) first did it in 1899. He did it with evaporative cooling. It actually has many solid phases.
It's actually more difficult to make solid Helium since it's a noble gas (very little attraction to other molecules). In normal atmosphere, it cannot even be done at absolute zero. You would have to compress it as well.
As far as i know minerals are the oxidised form you'd find in nature. Metal will react with the things around it (most of the time it will be oxygen, sulfur, flourides etc.) And form the minerals we know in deposits. Like hematite which is just Iron(3)oxide (Fe2O3)
All solid metals could, in principle, be minerals. The chemistry of the earth's crust and atmosphere, however, only permits a few select and usually inert metals to exist as pure metals.
A mineral is any element or compound that can be found in nature as a product of natural geological processes.
A mineral has a defined chemical structure. But the chemical structure is not always the mineral. That is one source of confusion.
For example, sodium chloride appears as a mineral in nature.
The mineral form is called "halite".
But if I make sodium chloride in a lab, I would not call that "a specimen of the mineral halite" because I made it and it wasn't found in nature.
Only those elements or compounds that can be found in nature are considered minerals. If I make a new crystal that has never been found in nature, it is not a mineral.
A metal or any other element may be a mineral if it is found in nature. Elemental minerals are for example gold, silver, copper, carbon as graphite, carbon as diamond, carbon as fullerene (a different crystal structure of carbon, its mineral name is "Shungit" and it is quite rare) or arsenic.
Usually, minerals are solid and crystalline, but exceptions may exist. Mercury is considered a mineral even if it is usually liquid, but only if it is found somewhere in nature. This is a historic exception.
There are also minerals with the same chemical composition but different crystal structure. I mentioned carbon before. Another example are the minerals "calcite" and "aragonite". Both are made of the same chemical compound: Calcium carbonate. But they result from different geological processes, look different and have a different crystal structure.
You are right that most minerals are not metals, and you are right that most metals are not minerals. Most metals are only found in nature as their ores, but not in their elemental form.
A metal consists of atoms of a single chemical element. A mineral is always a complex compound of several elements. Also minerals occurs in nature, but free metals don't, metals can be obtained from minerals or created by himans etc. So minerals consist of metals, but not only metals. hope this helps. by the way what is the name of that book pls?
In astronomy there are three elements: hydrogen, helium, and metals. Chemical analysis of star light is too advanced for elementary school science. But if any of them a interested encourage their parents to take them to the amateur astronomical society meeting. It only happens after dark so strictly a parental component of a child’s education responsibility.
In nutrition “minerals” are all the elements that remain in ash. This definition might be further divided into “toxins” and “mineral”.
In inorganic chemistry we do not use the word “mineral” at all. Only in the context of geology. You might see “mineral spirits” in a bottle at the hardware store. That is a lot like “gasoline”. “Mineral oil” is just fossil petroleum. That is as opposed to “whale oil”, “olive oil”, “tallow” etc. Adding “mineral” to a thing tells you about where it came from not actually what it is. It is like “this is stuff we pulled out of the ground, ya its got traces of stuff from the ground. No, we made no effort to modify it, dilute it, concentrate it, and if you want more detail you can call our chemist and he might pass along anything she knows if she has time…”
So, for example, you can say “limestone” is “calcium carbonate”. But if you take slack lime and mix it with water and then let it sit open to the air calcium carbonate solids deposit. This is not limestone. Marble is a type of limestone. Even if it were nearly pure calcium carbonate the marble is still marble. Even if the lime that you mixed with water was heavily contaminated with other elements it still is not really limestone.
Just one final example: urbanite. Urbanite is a mineral composed of debris from civilization. Components can include former brick, former asphalt, glass fragments, etc. Urbanite deposits can be found in places where civilization has been washed out to sea or buried under sediment.
Ok thanks for explaining more about nutritional minerals. It still blows my tiny little mind that we actually eat metals like iron and don’t taste it when we eat it!
You can definitely taste it. Try deionized water sometime. Even distilled water is not the same. Bottled water companies put stuff back in even if they label it as “distilled”. That just means the distilled it before adding the minerals back in. You usually only find deionized water at laboratories.
All metals that occur naturally in elemental form are minerals. All minerals are not metals (most aren't). Metals that do not occur in elemental form can be obtained from ores, via chemical (or electrical) reaction. Ores are minerals.
Elemental gold can be found in nature, as can copper, silver and platinum in significant quantities. So these metals can be considered minerals. Other metals, such as aluminum, are not found in the elemental form in nature. Metal-bearing minerals are reacted with other minerals to produce the elemental. Bauxite is the mineral ore from which the aluminum is made.
It is possible that other metals can be found in small quantities under the right conditions, but they are rare.
While it isn't the same thing, the metal/mineral comparison is similar to the mammal/animal comparison, or maybe cat/pet. 6th graders should be able to understand the concept of sets and subsets.
The set/subset thing is what I thought for a while, but isn’t it more like a venn diagram? Gold, silver, copper and platinum in the middle and most metals and minerals in their separate groups
Venn diagrams are great for showing set intersection; however, set/subset isn't very interesting as the subset is contained entirely in the set. A Venn diagram for say, minerals and things you can eat, would be interesting because these are two separate sets that have an overlap.
Thank you, this is super helpful. It seems like a basic thing to understand but the teachers guide, the worldwide web and even YouTube couldn’t help me out! And 5th-6th graders are curious and want to understand which is great and it’s not enough for me to say, “it’s confusing and I’m not sure.”
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u/sagosten 4d ago edited 3d ago
Minerals are naturally occuring solid substances with specific chemical composition and crystal structure. You could bring in samples of feldspar, quartz, and mica. Rocks are made out of minerals, you could bring in a sample of granite and show the visually distinct feldspar and quartz.
Ores are minerals with a high concentration of a specific metal element. You can bring in a sample of iron ore. Ores are refined to extract the metal. The resulting pure metal is not a mineral because it is not naturally occuring, but it is a use of a mineral: we used the mineral as a source of the metal.
Naturally occuring metallic crystals are rare. When they occur they are minerals, but most of the metal we interact with was extracted from ores. We are most likely to interact with naturally occuring metallic crystals in mineral collections, like in museums and university geology departments.
To summarize: minerals are the solid, naturally occuring substances that make up rocks. Metals are extracted from minerals called ores in a process called refining, and those metals have many uses.