MICROCLUSTER MINERAL TECHNOLOGY

Silicate Minerals

Geologists have studied, glacier waters throughout the world for over a century fascinated with the number and types of minerals that exist in these locations (Keller & Reesman, 1963, Keller, et al. 1963, 1979). In nutritional or biological science, a mineral often refers more specifically to a single element or salt of an element, however, to a geologist, mineral also refers to aggregates of several elements bound together forming clusters or tiny rocks, so to speak. There are hundreds of different types and sizes of these minerals found throughout various regions of the world.

Silicon (Si, chemical symbol) is the name for an element found m numerous rocks or minerals. Minerals containing this element in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO2 or silica) are called silicates (Dove, Rimstidt 1994). Silicates comprise one of the most abundant mineral types on the planet. Pure crystals containing only silica in their structures make up the quartz group and are more rare than other groups. Many silica minerals combine readily with other elements such as hydrogen, potassium, magnesium, chloride, iron, sodium, calcium, phosphate, and aluminum. These elements can be further released in solution. Silicate minerals, depending on their composition and resulting structures, make up minerals such as opal, cristabolite, feldspar, stilbite, orthoclase, phillipsite, olivine, the zeolite group and numerous others that geologists have classified (Dove, Rimstidt 1994, Keller, Balgord, Reesman, 1963).

Silicon is in the same chemical group as carbon and has similar bonding characteristics. Silica originates primarily from ocean animals. It is found abundantly in seashells and small micro-organisms that inhabit the oceans. Diatoms are one-celled microorganisms that secrete a tiny shell or covering made of silica and it is this material, when these creatures die, that settles to the ocean floor creating sand. Sand usually provides the source material for grinding into food grade silica for processing into dietary products or other of its many industrial uses.

Silicon has unique properties that have been utilized by several industries including the production of glass and the computer chip. It is a transition element meaning that it has both metallic and nonmetallic properties. Silica has also been used in numerous biological capacities to the researcher in the isolation and stabilization of bio-molecules on columns of silica gels because of their ability to bind biological and chemical compounds.