Materials

Quartz

Mineral

Citation Formats

General Reference

Earth and Environment Atlas. "Quartz." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://earth.interactiveatlas.org/materials/quartz.

APA Style

Earth and Environment Atlas. (n.d.). Quartz. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://earth.interactiveatlas.org/materials/quartz

BibTeX

@misc{earthandenvironmentatlas-quartz,
  author = {Earth and Environment Atlas},
  title = {Quartz},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://earth.interactiveatlas.org/materials/quartz},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The second most abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, built from a continuous framework of silicon and oxygen. It defines hardness 7 on the Mohs scale and is the main constituent of most beach sand.

Facts

Kind

Mineral 1

Formation Class

Framework silicate, classified compositionally as an oxide mineral 1

Chemical Formula

SiO2, a continuous framework of silicon-oxygen tetrahedra 1

Hardness (Mohs)

7 1

Quartz is the reference mineral that defines the value of 7 on the Mohs scale itself.

Cross-Tradition Connections

In Discipline

Mineralogy

Source Mineral (Wikipedia)

Sources

1. Quartz (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia FoundationView the Source

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