The flow of energy and elements between the geosphere and biosphere can be traced through changing redox chemistry of Earth’s surface. Deep-time trends in the mineral record, including mineral age and elemental composition, reveal a dynamic history of changing redox states and chemical speciation. We present a user-friendly exploratory network analysis platform called dragon (Deep-time Redox Analysis of the Geobiology Ontology Network) to facilitate investigation of the expanding redox chemical network preserved in the mineral record throughout Earth’s history and beyond. Given a user-indicated focal element or set of focal elements, dragon constructs interactive bipartite networks of minerals and their constituent elements over a specified range in geologic-time using information from the Mineral Evolution Database (https://rruff.info/evolution/). Written in the open-source language R as a Shiny application, dragon launches a browser-based dashboard to explore mineral evolution in deep-time. We demonstrate dragon’s utility through examining the mineral chemistry of lithium over deep-time. dragon is freely available from CRAN under a GPL-3 License, with source code and documentation hosted at https://github.com/sjspielman/dragon.

可以通过改变地球表面的氧化还原化学来追踪地球和生物圈之间的能量和元素的流动。矿物记录的深层趋势，包括矿物年龄和元素组成，揭示了氧化还原状态和化学形态变化的动态历史。我们提供了一个用户友好的探索性网络分析平台，称为Dragon（地球生物学本体网络的深度氧化还原分析），以方便调查整个地球历史及以后的矿物记录中保存的扩展的氧化还原化学网络。给定一个用户指示的焦点元素或一组焦点元素，dragon使用来自矿物演化数据库的信息在地质时间内在指定的范围内构造交互式的矿物及其构成元素二分网络（https://rruff.info/evolution/）。Dragon使用开源语言R作为Shiny应用程序编写，启动了一个基于浏览器的仪表板，以深入探索矿物演化。通过深入研究锂的矿物化学，我们证明了Dragon的效用。在GPL-3许可下，dragon可从CRAN免费获得，其源代码和文档托管在https://github.com/sjspielman/dragon。