The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.

A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history — and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

In a pair of papers published today in American Mineralogist, researchers Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison and their collaborators outline a new taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on precisely how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life influence each other.

Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That’s almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral “species” in the classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which focuses strictly on a mineral’s crystalline structure and chemical makeup.

Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist who is part of the astrobiology team at University of California, Riverside, thinks that might be pushing the methodology too far, since “you’re not going to go to those planets and collect minerals” to confirm the results. Nevertheless, he does see Hazen and Morrison’s taxonomy as a potentially important source of insights for studies of extraterrestrial minerals found on our moon and Mars.

“In a really zoomed-out, broad-scale way, we are understanding not just our planet [but also] our entire solar system, and potentially solar systems beyond,” Morrison said. “That’s really incredible.”