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Native element minerals are those elements that occur in nature in uncombined form with a distinct mineral structure. The elemental class includes metals, intermetallic compounds, alloys, metalloids, and nonmetals. The Nickel–Strunz classification system also includes the naturally occurring phosphides, silicides, nitrides, carbides, and ...
Native element minerals are those elements that occur in nature in uncombined form with a distinct mineral structure. The elemental class includes metals and intermetallic elements, semi-metals and non-metals. This group also includes natural alloys, phosphides, silicides, nitrides and carbides.
Many metals are found in uncombined metallic form, in varying degrees of purity. These "metals found as metals" are referred to as native metals, which are a subset of native element minerals. The most well-known native metals are native copper and gold. Nonreactive noble metals usually occur in nature as native metals.
Metals are not the only type of chemical element that can occur in the native state. Non-metallic elements occurring in the native state include carbon, sulfur, and selenium. Silicon, a semi-metal, has rarely been found in the native state as small inclusions in gold. [4]
Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements. [12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. [60]
Strontium commonly occurs in nature, being the 15th most abundant element on Earth (its heavier congener barium being the 14th), estimated to average approximately 360 parts per million in the Earth's crust [47] and is found chiefly as the sulfate mineral celestine (SrSO 4) and the carbonate strontianite (SrCO 3). Of the two, celestine occurs ...
Native copper is an uncombined form of copper that occurs as a natural mineral.Copper is one of the few metallic elements to occur in native form, although it most commonly occurs in oxidized states and mixed with other elements.
Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .