Borates. Handbook of deposits, processing, properties and use / Бораты. Руководство по месторождениям, переработке, свойствам и использованию

The borates are among the most interesting of the world's industrial minerals, having been known and used since the earliest recorded history, first for precious metal working and later in ceramics. They are an unusually large grouping of minerals, but the number of commercially important borates is limited, and their chemistry and crystal structure are both unusual and complex. There are only a few large deposits, with many smaller formations, and the number of noncommercial occurrences in other rocks or brines is very large. The accounts of the early exploration, mining, and processing of borates are fascinating, because their remote locations often led to unusual difficulties, hardships, and resourcefulness in recovering the desired products. This varied from workers wading into Himalayan lakes to harvest the "floor" and then transport the borax in saddlebags on sheep across the Himalaya's to the markets, to the "Dante's Inferno" of the Larderello boric acid fumaroles, to the colorful 20-mule teams of the western United States. Such operations helped in the development of these remote areas and slowly transformed borates from minor high-cost minerals into the large-volume industrial commodities they are today.

Boron's chemistry and reactivity are also fascinating because they form a wide variety of oxygen compounds (the borates) that occur in an essentially unending variety of simple to exceedingly complex molecules. Determining their crystal structures has given rise to a separate subfield of crystallography. Boron has only two isomers, ~~ and liB, and is somewhat unique in that the ratio of these isomers varies widely in nature. The isotopes' very different reactivity during both physical and chemical changes has allowed their determination to be a tool in predicting many geologic and other events, again forming a specialized field in geology. The I~ isomer has an unusually large neutroncapture cross section, which gives it a unique nuclear application and a potent medical use (another subdiscipline). Finally, boron's ability to form organic compounds gives it many specialized uses (a much underdeveloped field) and another subdiscipline. There have been many symposia and publications in each of these fields.  <...>