Abstract

Quartz is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s continental crust. Therefore, understanding of quartz dissolution and precipitation is very important to know about weathering processes and interactions between rocks and water in hydrothermal and metamorphic environments. This paper presents a basic review on the research about quartz dissolution mechanism under various physico-chemical conditions. We rearranged the relationship between each physico-chemical factor and dissolution mechanism from the results of previous researchers in this paper. From this result, we understood that quartz dissolution and precipitation are affected by each factor such as temperature, pH, and applied stress conditions at contact point. In particular, we recognized that the high pH and temperature conditions have different anion concentrations on mineral’s surface. As a result, high pH and temperature conditions have a better effect than applied stress condition to the quartz dissolution mechanism.

Keywords quartz dissolution, precipitation, Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm, Arrhenius parameters, activation volume