Parting Shot

I must explain the extension to my title. I wrote a Parting Shot with the title ‘Nooks and Crannies’ for Elements, 8 (2), 2012, in an issue on ‘Minerals, Microbes and Remediation’, devoted to nooks and crannies on weathered alkali feldspar surfaces. For international readers, I explained that (according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary) a ‘nook’ is ‘a corner or recess; a secluded place’ and a ‘cranny’ is ‘a chink, a crevice, a crack’. The reactivity of complex mineral surfaces is a complicating factor in ‘reactive transport’, particularly near Earth’s surface. The present issue provides me with an opportunity to dust-off a few old micrographs, images of considerable beauty in themselves, to remind readers that minerals are not just chemical compounds. It also allows me to introduce an intriguing discovery of the last five years. Some, but not all, feldspars are extremely effective at nucleating ice in clouds, and this may be related to nooks and crannies, not just to chemistry.

Can you locate Mercury
as it hovers over the Sun during its 2016 transit?

While working on extinct volcanoes in Germany, I always wanted to see Hawaii. This dream came true in 1984 when I was on my way to study volcanoes in Antarctica when we passed through Hawaii … and I got the thrill of seeing Pu‘u ‘O¯ ‘o¯ erupt. Later, over a beer, I was telling my friend, Russ Harmon, how my fieldwork adventures had fulfilled a long-held dream. “So, what’s your next dream?”, he asked. “I want to work on the volcanoes of the Atacama in South America”, was my answer, not realizing that he and his colleagues were planning a field campaign to work on Parinacota Volcano in northern Chile the next year. I was invited to join.