Host: Japan Association of Mineralogical Sciences
A phenomena that thermodynamically unstable minerals react over time to form a sequence of progressively more stable minerals is known as the Ostwald step rule; for example, precipitation of amorphous silica, followed by diagenetic changes to cristobalite to quartz. We carried out the Monte Carlo simulations with lattice gas model, in which both state changes and movement of silica particles in solution are considered. We show that relative magnitude of interfacial energies among phases and saturation indices of minerals are critical to determine the nucleation pathways, and that a small amount of impurity changes the reaction pathway drastically.
