Abstract
The flow of energy and elements between the geosphere and biosphere can be traced through changing redox chemistry of Earth’s surface. Deep-time trends in the mineral record, including mineral age and elemental composition, reveal a dynamic history of changing redox states and chemical speciation. We present a user-friendly exploratory network analysis platform called dragon (Deep-time Redox Analysis of the Geobiology Ontology Network) to facilitate investigation of the expanding redox chemical network preserved in the mineral record throughout Earth’s history and beyond. Given a user-indicated focal element or set of focal elements, dragon constructs interactive bipartite networks of minerals and their constituent elements over a specified range in geologic-time using information from the Mineral Evolution Database (http://rruff.info/evolution/). Written in the open-source language R as a Shiny application, dragon launches a browser-based dashboard to explore mineral evolution in deep-time. We demonstrate dragon’s utility through examining the mineral chemistry of lithium (Li) over deep-time. dragon is freely available from CRAN under a GPL-3 License, with source code and documentation hosted at https://github.com/sjspielman/dragon.
Highlights
Major events in Earth history, such as the formation of continents (Cawood et al, 2018), enhanced chemical weathering (Satkoski et al, 2016), and atmospheric oxygenation (Farquhar et al, 2000) have dramatically influenced the chemistry and redox state of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and crust
Earth surface redox conditions govern the flow of electrons among chemical species in aqueous systems and directly influenced microbial metabolic pathways and the chemistry of potential metal cofactors preserved in minerals during the Hadean and Archean Eons (Jelen et al, 2016; Morrison et al, 2018)
Users select their desired network focal element(s) and an age range for minerals to include in the network. dragon will include all minerals that contain the element(s) whose oldest, or youngest if the user prefers, known age, based on mineral discovery information provided by MED, is within the selected age range
Summary
Major events in Earth history, such as the formation of continents (Cawood et al, 2018), enhanced chemical weathering (Satkoski et al, 2016), and atmospheric oxygenation (Farquhar et al, 2000) have dramatically influenced the chemistry and redox state of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and crust. The Mineral Evolution Database [https://rruff.info/evolution/ (Golden et al, 2019), last accessed 8/24/20] is a comprehensive resource for studying mineralogy in geologic time. It contains the chemical formulas, element redox states, and age data (including youngest- and oldest-known ages) for documented mineral occurrences of 5,603 known minerals, nearly 5,000 of which have associated locality pairings, found throughout Earth’s history and from extraterrestrial sources such as asteroids, meteorites, and pre-solar sources. We demonstrate how dragon can be used to reveal trends in the evolving redox history of Earth’s surface and crust These trends can in turn be used to generate testable hypotheses about factors that impacted geochemical cycling and the evolution of metabolic electron transfer
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