The commission, known as the CNMNC, operates as the gatekeeper of mineral names worldwide. When researchers believe they have found a mineral unknown to science, they submit a proposal containing the ideal chemical formula, the crystal system and space group, precise unit-cell parameters measured by single-crystal or powder X-ray diffraction, the strongest lines of the powder diffraction pattern, and the location of the type specimen that will serve as the permanent reference. The commission’s newsletter format releases the essential data ahead of the full descriptive paper, which the authors are still required to publish. This system matters because mineral names are load-bearing elements of science: they encode chemistry, structure and geological context, and once a name enters the literature it is cited for decades in fields ranging from ore exploration to planetary science.

The most eye-catching approval is hydroxyapophyllite-(NH4), a hydrous calcium silicate containing ammonium, found as an inclusion within the Kaidun meteorite, which fell near Khuraybah in South Yemen on December 3, 1980. Kaidun is legendary among meteoriticists because it is a breccia packed with fragments of many different parent bodies, and it has repeatedly yielded minerals that are rare or unknown on Earth. The new apophyllite-group species is tetragonal, with space group P4/mcn and unit-cell parameters a = 9.0058 Å and c = 15.7639 Å, and its structure has been fully determined. The type material rests in the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. The presence of ammonium in an extraterrestrial silicate speaks to volatile-rich environments in the solar nebula or on parent bodies, conditions in which nitrogen-bearing fluids interacted with silicates at low temperature.

Several of the other new minerals come from classic ore deposits that continue to surprise. From the Shuangjianzishan deposit in the Great Hinggan Range of China comes luoxianchangite, Ag8SnS4Se2, a sulfosalt described as the partially selenium-substituted analogue of canfieldite, the well-known silver-tin sulfide. It is orthorhombic, space group Pmn21, with its structure determined and type material deposited at the Geological Museum of China in Beijing. Silver-tin selenides and sulfosalts are of more than academic interest: they define the mineralogy of epithermal ore systems and can influence how silver is extracted and processed. The same Chinese museum also holds the type specimen of magnesio-fluoro-riebeckite, a sodium-magnesium-iron amphibole with fluorine occupying the hydroxyl site, recovered from the western part of the Bayan Obo deposit in Inner Mongolia, the world’s largest source of rare-earth elements. Its monoclinic C2/m structure fits the amphibole supergroup framework, but the exact magnesium-fluorine combination had not previously met the criteria for a distinct species.

Poland contributed jordanówite, a complex zirconium-titanium oxide with the ideal formula Zr(Ti3+Zr)Ti3+AlO16, discovered in a quarry near the village of Jordanów Śląski, about thirty kilometers south of Wrocław in Lower Silesia. The mineral is tetragonal, space group I41/a, closely related to jianmuite, and its type specimen is held at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Wrocław. Minerals containing trivalent titanium are uncommon at Earth’s surface because Ti3+ requires reducing conditions, so its occurrence records an unusual redox environment during the mineral’s formation. Meanwhile, from the high Pamir of Tajikistan, at an elevation of 4428 meters in the oxidation zone of the Solnechnoye antimony deposit, comes dmitrievite, Sb4Cl2O5, a monoclinic antimony oxychloride with a known synthetic analogue. Oxidation zones are natural chemistry laboratories where primary sulfides react with air and water, and antimony chlorides and oxides there form some of the most structurally exotic compounds known in nature.

Chile’s Atacama Desert, whose hyperarid nitrate and chloride salts have long been a goldmine for new species, yielded agujaite, a hydrated sodium-aluminum arsenate with a strikingly complex formula, Na6Al6(H2O)15(OH)3(AsO4)5(AsO3OH)3·3H2O, found at the Torrecillas mine near Salar Grande. Crucially, the commission lists it as a new structure type, meaning its atomic arrangement is unlike any previously characterized mineral. It is trigonal, space group R3c1, and its type specimens are preserved at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Lead author Anthony Kampf and colleagues have made the Torrecillas mine one of the most productive single localities in modern mineralogy, and agujaite adds yet another chapter. Arsenate minerals like this one also carry practical weight, since they demonstrate how arsenic is immobilized or mobilized in mine wastes and evaporitic environments.

The United States, Australia and Morocco round out the geographic spread. From the Burro mine in Colorado’s Slick Rock district comes flatimerite, an extraordinary vanadium compound in the pascoite family whose formula contains a large polycationic aluminum cluster, [Al13(OH)24(H2O)24], balanced by mixed-valence vanadium oxide anions and sulfate-water groups; it is triclinic, space group P1. From the dumps of the Bamford Hill Mine in Queensland, Australia, petfordite, ZrW6+O7(OH)2(H2O)2, is the tungsten analogue of kingsgateite, a tetragonal hydrated zirconium tungstate. Zincocabrerite, from the Bou Azzer cobalt-arsenide district of Morocco, is the zinc analogue of cabrerite, while hugotibergite, from Sweden’s legendary Långban mine, is the calcium-dominant analogue of roeblingite. Långban, worked since the Middle Ages, remains one of the most species-rich localities on Earth, and hugotibergite shows that even centuries-old mines still hold undiscovered chemistry. Japan’s Mogurazawa mine produced vanadoandrosite-(La), a lanthanum-bearing epidote-supergroup mineral, and Russia’s Eastern Siberia yielded sakhanaiskite, an iron-titanium niobate of the columbite supergroup from a granite massif, while Mexico’s Moctezuma mine gave zhaoyuanite, a manganese-zinc tellurate related to denningite.

Beyond the new species, the newsletter records two corrections that reveal how much care mineral nomenclature demands. The name schultenite has been executively changed to schulténite, restoring the accent that matches the original spelling of the name of August Benjamin af Schultén, the Finnish chemist honored when the mineral was first described in 1926. The commission attributes the missing accent to a simple oversight during the massive renaming of minerals that took place some years ago. Separately, the ideal formula of modraite, a vesuvianite-group mineral first announced in an earlier newsletter, was corrected during peer review, with the commission noting that the revision is consistent with similar changes recently applied to alumovesuvianite, cyprine and fluorvesuvianite. Such adjustments are not pedantry: formulas and diacritics are the data of mineralogy, and a wrong formula propagates through databases, thermodynamic models and textbooks.

For the broader public, the appeal of these approvals lies in what they say about how much remains unknown. Roughly six thousand mineral species are now officially recognized, yet new ones are approved at a steady clip every year, many from mine dumps, desert salts and meteorite slices that have been studied for generations. Each new species is a precise statement that a particular combination of elements, under particular pressures, temperatures and redox conditions, builds a particular crystal architecture that nature had never before been caught making. The thirteen minerals of Newsletter 92 span four continents, one meteorite and nearly every major mineral class, from sulfosalts to arsenates to niobates. They are, in effect, thirteen new data points on the periodic table’s behavior in the real world, and the fact that one of them formed before Earth existed gives the whole list an appropriately cosmic dimension.

Subject of Research: Official approval of thirteen new mineral species and nomenclature revisions by the IMA Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification

Article Title: IMA Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) – Newsletter 92

Article References: Bosi, F., Hatert, F., Pasero, M., & Mills, S. J. (2026). IMA Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) – Newsletter 92. European Journal of Mineralogy, 38(4), 491-495. https://doi.org/10.5194/ejm-38-491-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/ejm-38-491-2026

Keywords: mineralogy, new minerals, IMA, CNMNC, crystallography, Kaidun meteorite, apophyllite, arsenates, sulfosalts, nomenclature, European Journal of Mineralogy, type specimens