Unique Mineral Identifiers and the Nickel-Strunz list

Here is a little background on this post.

Jim Ferraiolo sent me a copy of the current Nickel-Strunz list for inclusion in Webmineral.com. I use the IMA proposal numbers to add the mineral to my database when the IMA number is proposed. When the proposal is published, I convert the IMA proposal number to the "real" mineral name and that's that. Proposal numbers that don't get published stay that way.

There is a kind of elegance to the "unique species number". I viewed both the Dana and the old Hugo Strunz number as the “Unique Well Identifier�? (Pardon my data processing geology roots) in my database. As such it is the only way to keep track of the mineral name changes. I prefer to call it a “Unique Mineral Identifier�? UMI. Traditionally, the UMI was the mineral's name. This is no longer true. You only need to review the labuntsovite and amphibole committee work to see this.

If a UMI is the only way to identify the individual mineral species then the current Nickel-Strunz numbers needs to have the IMA proposal number to be unique. Since we (theoretically) only have IMA proposal numbers that go back to 1959 this leaves us with half the mineral species without a unique number or UMI.

Tell Ernie that he at least needs to assign individual species numbers to all the pre-1959 mineral species. Since we already have the old Hugo Strunz species numbers, this should be an easy task of stripping the species numbers off the old Strunz number and putting it on the new Strunz number.

The UMI is going to be really important if the current trend of re-naming perfectly valid mineral species names accelerates in the future.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2008 12:06PM by Dave Barthelmy.

Concerning Strunz 'individual numbering', and an email discussion with Ernie Nickel:

In the previous editions of the official Strunz classification, there were no individual numbers for mineral species within a group. Strunz's original reason for giving the one code to all minerals within a group was to demonstrate structural-chemical relationships.

Individual numbers for mineral species were generated by Alexander Hölzel. His general classification scheme was based on the Strunz system, and has superficial similarities, and was unfortunately regarded by some as being authorized by Strunz. This, however, is not the case, and Ernie Nickel did tell me that Strunz had expressed his 'outrage' about the Hölzel numbering in correspondence to him some years ago.

Ernie does not "see the advantage in giving each mineral species its separate code; surely the mineral name itself is the code."


Dana 7 appears to be the original source of sequential numbering within groups. Dana 6 numbers the valid species sequentially through the entire volume, but no effort is made to insert any of the new species listed in the three appendices into the numerical sequence.