Goldschmidt Day 3 (and 4): Minerals: A Glimpse into Earth’s History! 📚
The Goldschmidt conference enters its third day, accompanied by a pleasant drop in temperatures that allows attendees to walk comfortably in the streets without undergoing acid dissolution. On this nice day, I had the privilege of participating in session 13b – Geochemical Advances in Carbonate Proxies. This session began on Wednesday afternoon and extended throughout Thursday morning. Considering that humans have inhabited our planet for only a minuscule portion of its vast history, scientists rely on natural samples to unveil the conditions prevailing thousands and millions of years ago. Minerals serve as invaluable sources of information when it comes to understanding various aspects of our planet past such as climate conditions and, ocean levels, temperature, salinity, and much more. Among the mineral groups that hold particular importance for this purpose, carbonates are one of the most relevant group. Constituting 25% of the world’s sedimentary rocks, carbonates are also extensively used by diverse organisms as biominerals to build their skeletons. These minerals host a plethora of mineralogical, isotopic, and chemical data, facilitating the interpretation of our planet’s past.
Throughout this session, we had great talks discussing the intriguing formation processes of these minerals, both through biomineralization and abiogenic pathways, often involving amorphous precursors. The incorporation of trace elements into the crystal structure and the dynamic evolution of isotopic composition across time were also explored. These findings shed light on the invaluable insights we can derive from such data, as well as the challenges that scientists face in their quest to decipher our planet’s history. It  was an exceptional session! Evidenced not only from the multitude of talks and posters but also from the enthusiastic audience who attended.