How does metal, like steel, naturally occur in nature?
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Steel doesn’t,
Iron ore is extremely common, and aluminum in bauxite nodes.
Iron can pretty easily be melted out of deposits and then hammered together to make ingots to further refine.
Iron is refined and carbon is added to make steel.
In modern times though
Metal containing ores, are crushed and melted in crucibles and get further refined and processed for manufacturing
It would be pretty unlikely for steel to naturally occur in nature, because that’s iron mixed with carbon and with relatively high purity.
What you tend to find in nature is a metallic ore, like hematite. That’s iron bound to oxygen. You refine the ore via smelting or other methods to get pure metal.
The metal atoms themselves probably ultimately come from a star’s fusion or supernova, before the Earth was formed.
Steel does not naturally occur. Steel is a mixture of iron and carbon, both of which form during the death of stars.
> like steel
Well, that one doesn’t. Steel is a very specific form of iron, and even if you somehow randomly get a natural blast furnace, it would take some comical natural Rube Goldberg scenario to get everything together to make *stainless* steel alloy – normal steel will just corrode to rust in a few months/years.
Otherwise, most of the time metals are present as part of minerals. For example, iron tends to be present as things like Iron(III) oxide ([hematite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite)) or Iron(II,III) oxide ([magnetite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite)). These are basically various forms of crystallized rust. Aluminum tends to take a bunch of forms like [gibbsite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbsite) and mix with other minerals to form [bauxite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite). You might even be lucky enough to find crystallized aluminum oxide – [corundum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum), which has red and blue color variants commonly known as “ruby” and “sapphire”.
You might even find elemental, pure metals! Gold likes to do that – it’s very non-reactive, so it doesn’t form oxides and such like most other metals. This is where sifting river sediment for pure gold nuggets comes in. You can also find copper like that, it makes [interesting shapes!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_copper)
Steel is not a metal in the same way that gold or are metals. Steel is an alloy, meaning it’s a specific blend of mostly iron metal, some carbon, and a few other elements. While iron can sometimes be found in things like meteorites, most metals are dug up out of the ground as ore: basically trapped in rocks as a mineral. We need to purify the metal out to make it usable.
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