Ancestors

Toot

Written by DrKylara on 2024-09-15 at 19:12

[#]mincup24

Why do so many people like the boring, non-radioactive minerals?

Where is your sense of adventure? Your love of creation (of new nuclides)? Your 20th century nostalgia?

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Descendants

Written by CCochard on 2024-09-15 at 20:58

@DrKylara is celestine radioactive?

Anyway calcite is way too cool to not vote for it.

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Written by CEDunn on 2024-09-16 at 00:50

@CCochard @DrKylara

Idk, but most strontium is stable (not radioactive)

My understanding is that there is a lot of focus on Sr90 because it is radioactive and a long lasting component of nuclear fallout that gets biologically incorporated into the body.

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Written by CCochard on 2024-09-16 at 05:04

@cdunnpasadena @DrKylara that was my assumption that they assumed strontium was (always) radioactive, but maybe there is more to it?

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Written by DrKylara on 2024-09-16 at 05:44

@CCochard @cdunnpasadena

No, I am not assuming all Sr is Sr90. To my knowledge Sr90 doesn’t occur naturally in any significant quantity?

I would assume that Celestine itself is no more radioactive than our bones, probably significantly less so, since our bodies have potassium knocking around. But Sr is used in radiometric dating, and the relevant nuclides are not particularly rare.

I really meant this as a more general comment. Most of the minerals with significant Uranium, Thorium, or Strontium components seem to get voted out, and it makes me sad.

I also enjoy most of the arsenides and arsenates and any mineral with nitrogen doing something weird.

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Written by CCochard on 2024-09-16 at 05:47

@DrKylara @cdunnpasadena thank you for telling us!

I am not a mineralogist, I am a material scientist so never thought of the datation purposes of minerals.

Do you have a cool reference about it?

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Written by DrKylara on 2024-09-16 at 23:10

@CCochard @cdunnpasadena

Not sure about cool, but this explainer ( https://www2.tulane.edu/~sanelson/eens212/radiometric_dating.htm ) has actual details on the most common systems used for rock dating.

The most useful isotopes for radiometric dating of rocks have long half-lives (like a billion years or more). Thus, they aren’t always the ones you think of as being particularly radioactive. Isotopes we think of as particularly radioactive decay much faster, and thus disappear over geologically relevant time frames.

I got Rb and Sr mixed up before. It’s Rubidium that decays to strontium, not the other way around.

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