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Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups. They are the largest and most important class of minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of Earth's crust. In mineralogy, silica (silicon dioxide, SiO 2) is usually considered a silicate mineral rather than an oxide mineral. Silica is found in nature as the mineral ...
- Classification of silicate minerals
This list gives an overview of the classification of...
- Silicate
In chemistry, a silicate is any member of a family of...
- Classification of silicate minerals
Approximately 25 percent of all known minerals and 40 percent of the most common ones are silicates; the igneous rocks that make up more than 90 percent of Earth’s crust are composed of virtually all silicates. The fundamental unit in all silicate structures is the silicon-oxygen (SiO4)4– tetrahedron.
Silicate minerals form the largest group of minerals on Earth, comprising the vast majority of the Earth’s mantle and crust. Of the nearly four thousand known minerals on Earth, most are rare. There are only a few that make up most of the rocks likely to be encountered by surface dwelling creatures like us.
The vast majority of the minerals that make up the rocks of Earth’s crust are silicate minerals. These include minerals such as quartz, feldspar, mica, amphibole, pyroxene, olivine, and a great variety of clay minerals. The building block of all of these minerals is the silica tetrahedron, a combination of four oxygen atoms and one silicon atom.
A silicate mineral is a mineral that has a combination of the elements silicon and oxygen. In other words, a silicate mineral has one or more silicates . These minerals (especially feldspar ) make up about 90% of the Earth's crust .
