What is Hematite?
Hematite is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth's surface and in the shallow crust. It is an iron oxide with a chemical composition of Fe2O3. It is a common rock-forming mineral found in sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks at locations throughout the world.
Hematite is the most important ore of iron. Although it was once mined at thousands of locations around the world, today almost all of the production comes from a few dozen large deposits where significant equipment investments allow companies to efficiently mine and process the ore. Most ore is now produced in China, Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Canada, Venezuela, and the United States. Hematite has a wide variety of other uses, but their economic significance is very small compared to the importance of iron ore. The mineral is used to produce pigments, preparations for heavy media separation, radiation shielding, ballast, and many other products.

Physical Properties of Hematite
Hematite has an extremely variable appearance. Its luster can range from earthy to submetallic to metallic. Its color ranges include red to brown and black to gray to silver. It occurs in many forms that include micaceous, massive, crystalline, botryoidal, fibrous, oolitic, and others. Even though what is hematite has a highly variable appearance, it always produces a reddish streak. Students in introductory geology courses are usually surprised to see a silver-colored mineral produce a reddish streak. They quickly learn that the reddish streak is the most important clue for identifying hematite.
Hematite is not magnetic and should not respond to a common magnet. However, many specimens of hematite contain enough magnetite that they are attracted to a common magnet. This can lead to an incorrect assumption that the specimen is magnetite or the weakly magnetic pyrrhotite. The investigator must check other properties to make a proper identification. If the investigator checks the streak, a reddish streak will rule out identification as magnetite or pyrrhotite. Instead, if the specimen is magnetic and has a reddish streak, it is most likely a combination of what is hematite and magnetite.

Geologic Occurrence
Hematite is found as a primary mineral and as an alteration product in igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. It can crystallize during the differentiation of a magma or precipitate from hydrothermal fluids moving through a rock mass. It can also form during contact metamorphism when hot magmas react with adjacent rocks.
The most important hematite deposits formed in sedimentary environments. About 2.4 billion years ago, Earth’s oceans were rich in dissolved iron, but very little free oxygen was present in the water. Then a group of cyanobacteria became capable of photosynthesis. The bacteria used sunlight as an energy source to convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, oxygen, and water. This reaction released the first free oxygen into the ocean environment. The new oxygen immediately combined with the iron to form hematite, which sank to the bottom of the seafloor and became the rock units that we know today as the banded iron formations.
Soon, photosynthesis was occurring in many parts of Earth’s oceans, and extensive what is hematite deposits were accumulating on the seafloor. This deposition continued for hundreds of millions of years from about 2.4 to 1.8 million years ago. This allowed the formation of iron deposits hundreds to several thousand feet thick that are laterally persistent over hundreds to thousands of square miles. They comprise some of the largest rock formations in Earth’s rock record.