Haydn H. Murray

TL;DR: Clays have been and continue to be one of the more important industrial minerals and are widely utilized in many facets of our society as mentioned in this paper.Clays and clay minerals are used in geology, agriculture, construction, engineering, process industries, and environmental applications.

TL;DR: The clay minerals kaolin, smectite and palygorskite-sepiolite are among the world's most important and useful industrial minerals as discussed by the authors and they are important in a number of geological applications such as stratigraphic correlations, indicators of environments of deposition and temperature for generation of hydrocarbons.

TL;DR: A discussion of the applications of clay materials is organized as follows: kaolins; smectites; palygorskite (attapulgite) and sepiolite; and miscellaneous as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The main commercially important kaolin resources at the present time are the primary deposits of Cornwall in England and the sedimentary deposits in Georgia and South Carolina in the USA as discussed by the authors, which can be classified into two types, primary (residual) and secondary (sedimentary).

TL;DR: In the 21st century the emphasis in exploration will be in the developing nations, and the level of sophistication in exploration methods will increase as discussed by the authors, and the trends are towards finer particle size, higher purity and surface modification to both permit their more specialized application in industry and to resist the challenges from other natural and synthetic minerals.