The vibrant colors of Earth’s 4.5 billion year lifespan

I'm a mineralogist. I love minerals, and they're so important in our lives

Virtually all the raw materials we use for technology, for our automobiles, for agriculture

indeed, every living thing depends on minerals. But what else? Minerals tell stories because they're

incredibly information-rich. Every mineral is a time capsule. And they tell us about the four and a half

billion year history of our planet. So we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be able to talk about

minerals if it weren't from the minerals themselves. Minerals were fundamental to the origin of life

There were all sorts of key steps, catalysis, reactants, protective surfaces that you couldn't have made

life's chemistry without those special characteristics of minerals. What we've learned, and this is

astonishing, is that Earth is going through these complete changes in character, in color

Earth started off as a black planet covered with basalt, and then the rains came, and the oceans came

and Earth transformed to a blue planet where it was covered by an ocean Then we started plate tectonics a process by which the near surface and the deep interior are churned in a way that creates gray continents of granite

Life evolves to produce an oxygen-rich atmosphere that rusts the planet and you get a red planet

now, much like Mars, but that's what our continents would have looked like two billion years ago

Then we went through periods of getting very hot and very cold. And in the coldest stages, we think the entire planet was covered by the white mineral ice

The ice melted and the continents became green because life learned to live on land

And so you now had a green planet and you also had all kinds of biominerization

We had shells and we had teeth and we had bones that showed the struggle for survival in life

But that struggle involved minerals as well. So for that entire four and a half billion history, we've seen the co-evolution of the geosphere and life, the abundant life we see on Earth today

My favorite mineral, I suppose I should say it's hazanite, which was named after me

But there's a little bit of a downside here. It's only found in one place in the world

It disappears every time it rained. and it's basically microbial poop