Resumen de Lessons from 100 years of mineral data
Industrial Minerals
It is probably no surprise that global production of industrial minerals has increased dramatically between 1913 and 2012, but closer examination of the data reveals the staggering scale of the increase. For example, production of graphite in 1913 was slightly more than 143,000 tonnes, whereas in 2012, global output was more than 2.1m tonnes, an increase of 1,370%. Production of magnesite in 1913 was 354,000 tonnes compared with nearly 24.5m tonnes in 2012; an increase of more than 6,800%. These are equivalent to increases of 14% and 68% per year, respectively, in each of the 100 years.
There have been many changes since the first edition - not least the dropping of references to the "British Empire" and the somewhat derogatory sounding reference to "foreign" countries, which happened in 1950. Political changes are also reflected in the changing of country names: early editions refer to Persia, Siam and Ceylon, for example - today Iran, Thailand and Sri Lanka, respectively. The dissolution and unification of countries is also reflected by their appearance or disappearance in the volumes. For example, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and was replaced by 15 'new' countries, whereas the former states known as the "Federal Republic of Germany" (West) and the "German Democratic Republic" (East) are replaced simply with "Germany", following reunification in 1990. A meander through the series of books quickly becomes a lesson in 20[superscript]th century geographical history.
The emergence of China as a leading producer of many industrial minerals, as it is for many metals, is clear in the data. In 1962, China produced 3% of the world's barite, 9% of the world's fluorspar and 8% of the world's graphite, though virtually none of the world's magnesite. In contrast, in 2012 China produced 45% of the world's barite, 62% of fluorspar, 86% of graphite and 65% of magnesite. Of the 28 industrial minerals covered by World Mineral Production and listed in Table 2, China was the leading producer of 12 in 2012, whereas in 1962 it was not the leading producer of any.
