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List of mineral tests

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 14, 2024
Entity authorityQ6628594 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mineral tests are simple physical and chemical methods of testing samples, which can help to identify the mineral type. This approach is used widely in mineralogy, ore geology and general geological mapping.

The following tests are some examples of those that are used on hand specimens, or on field samples, or on thin sections with the aid of a polarizing microscope.

Color

Color of the mineral. Color alone is not diagnostic. For example quartz can be almost any color, depending on minor impurities and microstructure.

Streak

Color of the mineral's powder. This can be found by rubbing the mineral onto a concrete. This is more accurate but not always mineral specific.

Lustre

This is the way light reflects from the mineral's surface.

Editorial summary

“List of mineral tests” enters the record as wikimedia list article. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, mineral and tests can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 122-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around List, mineral and tests.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 14, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q6628594. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of mineral tests” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.