Talc

Talc is one of the softest minerals—its hardness defines a ‘1’ on Moh’s scale of hardness. I just learned its structure at the molecular level, and I can’t resist showing it to you.

Talc is layers of octahedra sandwiched in tetrahedra!

Since these sandwiches form separate parallel sheets, I bet they can easily slide past each other. That must be why talc is so soft.

The octahedra are magnesium oxide and the tetrahedra are silicon oxide… with some hydroxyl groups attached to liven things up. The overall formula is Mg₃Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂. It’s called ‘hydrated magnesium silicate’.

The image here was created by Materialscientist and placed on Wikicommons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.