Most clays are crystalline, but some are amorphous.

Pigments based on minerals and clays often bore the name of the city or region where they were mined.

The principal sources of rare earth elements are the minerals bastnäsite, monazite, and loparite and the lateritic ion adsorption clays.

Lithium occurs in a number of pegmatitic minerals, but due to its solubility as an ion, is present in ocean water and is commonly obtained from brines and clays.

Occurrence and production Although thallium is a modestly abundant element in the Earth's crust, with a concentration estimated to be about 0.7 mg kg, mostly in association with potassium based minerals in clays, soils, and granites, thallium is not generally economically recoverable from these sources.

And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles.