Talk:Native metal
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[edit] Listed metals
I appreciate that this article is a stub. It certainly needs expansion. However I am very surprised to see galleries.com naming such reactive metals as Aluminium, Lead, zinc, iron and tin as native metals. I appreciate that iron occurs in meterorites, but that is a special case. I certainly remember being told of native copper and gold, and am prepared to believe that similar metals such as silver, platinum and palladium can occur geologically as native metals, but I find the appearance of the rest in the list most surprising. Can some one enlighten further, perhaps by exapnding this article to indicate what metals do indeed routinely occur as natvie metals? Peterkingiron 11:21, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
- They tend to occur in highly reducing environments. For example, aluminum has been documented in mud volcanoes, which are frequently associated with petroleum deposits. All of the reactive elements are extremely rare as native elements. For some odd reason most of them tend to occur in Russia. Search Mindat for locality information. Bear in mind that some of these metals (such as titanium) occur only as small inclusions in other minerals; there is even a variety of fluorite that (as a result of high background radiation) contains native fluorine. --Pyrochem (talk) 07:51, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
