Editorials

An article on the “sleeping beauties” in science (Ke et al. 2015) recently appeared on my desk (or more accurately, on my desktop). “Sleeping beauties” in science have been defined by van Raan (2004) to be publications that go unnoticed for a long time and then suddenly attract a great deal of attention. The “sleeping beauty” concept prompted me to review whether their existence is a component of our current publication practices. Do we have the incentive to develop risky ideas or the time to put together significant, paradigm-shifting papers?

I am sure that many of us remember “mineralogy” from our student days as beginning with the orthosilicate group, passing quickly through sorosilicates to beryl, then through pyroxenes and amphiboles, and on to micas, feldspars, and the silica minerals. Amphiboles were studied to exhaustion, their nomenclature (now mostly discarded) being then regarded as of prime importance. Sulfides, on the other hand, were almost completely ignored, despite their economic importance and significance, as we now know, as agents of climate cooling. In petrography classes, sulfides were classified together with oxides as “opaques” and dismissed from further consideration.

St. Helens erupted catastrophically at 8:32 a.m. on 18 May 1980 in southern Washington state, about 50 miles northeast of Portland (Oregon, USA). This eruption was preceded by a magnitude 5.1 earthquake and a subsequent landslide that are thought to have triggered the main eruption.