Editorials
NUCLEATING IDEAS AND CRYSTALS—TO DO OR NOT TO DO
Sumit Chakraborty | February 2025
As a faculty member, a question one often encounters from students is: should I do a PhD? I find this a very difficult one to answer. The set of skills that makes one a good student is not necessarily the same as that which makes a good researcher. Some basics are common— knowledge, intelligence, application, discipline, and work ethic are essential for both. But beyond that, there are fundamental differences. Knowing and understanding well what has been taught makes a good student. When studying for exams to get good grades, one can look up the answers in a book or ask the teacher for explanations when one does not understand a topic.
THE MAJESTIC HIMALAYA(S): THE ROOF OF THE WORLD!
Janne Blichert-Toft | December 2024
It is my great pleasure to welcome Elements’ broad readership to this captivating issue on one of Earth’s absolutely singular and spectacular geological features: the Himalaya! (Figs. 1 and 2) Before I continue, let me first clear up the spelling subtlety you have probably already caught on to: I always learned that it is written “the Himalayas” in plural, not “the Himalaya” in singular. Even a recent cartoon published in “The New Yorker” on April 23, 2024 used the spelling “Himalayas,” as does the New York Times consistently, to name just a few major publications I read regularly and, as a non-native English speaker, trust as examples for correct English spelling and grammar.
NEW TOOLS, NEW VISIONS, NEW INSIGHTS
There’s some small irony that I’m Principal Editor for an Elements issue on luminescence, since I have partial but significant redgreen color blindness. Invisible to me is hypersthene’s faint pink pleochroism, I can’t say that actinolite is green in thin section and hornblende is brown, although the former looks paler and the latter darker, and a long-time coworker enjoys pointing out that I walk right past blue-green copper staining on some granitic rock faces. My color blindness, of course, had no influence on the excellent present issue. It was the Guest Editors, Lutz Nasdala, Emmanuel Fritsch, and Jens Götze, with the vision to propose an issue on luminescence and who did the serious work of wrangling authors and polishing their articles. Where my limited color vision does come in is in my appreciation for the article authors’ clear explanations of how to take luminescence beyond pretty pictures, employing spectroscopy and other measurements to quantify the emitted light, explain its causes, and share some of the rich insights that luminescence gives about geologic processes.
EARLY—AND FUTURE—PLANETARY ENVIRONMENTS
The topic of this newest Elements issue that you are about to embark on is par ticularly close to my heart because it is all about the early Earth, which is one of the main reasons I became a geologist and a geochemist in the first place and which has taken up a big part of my ensuing almost 40 year long research career. Becoming a geologist was a choice no one from the medical world I grew up in as an only child of two doctors, one a surgeon, expected I would make, especially given the poor prospect at the time (in Denmark) of ever being able to make a living out of it, at least compared with practicing medicine.
CELEBRATING THE CREATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS OF JAPANESE EARTH SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS
By Becky Lange | April, 2024
The first car I bought was a used 1978 Honda Accord hatchback. I don’t recall what I paid, but the car served me well, with no repairs required, for the five years I owned it as a graduate student. The only other make and model I considered was a used Toyota Corolla. At the time in the mid-1980s, I would not have touched a used American-made car with a 10-foot pole because of their gas-guzzling thirst and frequent need of repair, which stood in marked contrast to the fuel efficiency and reliability of available Japanese cars. The reasons for this contrast, in this era, are well explained in Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, and in David Halberstam’s 1986 book, The Reckoning. In the latter, Halberstam compares two auto companies, Nissan in Japan and Ford in the United States, during the four decades following World War II.
NEW YEAR, BROADER PERSPECTIVE
By Sumit Chakraborty | February, 2024
As I write this editorial, festivities of the holiday season are in the air. Wishes of “Happy Holidays” are floating across continents, crossing religious and cultural boundaries. It is not just Christmas or Hannukah or Deepawali—there are people celebrating Lohri, or Ashura, or the Yalda night, or Kwanzaa, or Poush Parbon, or one of many other festivals. Different stories, different legends, some celebrations more prominent than others, but there is one common theme: the human ability to celebrate light at the darkest of times, to seek out and worship the Sun when it is least present (to the extent that these traditions all evolved in the Northern Hemisphere). That ability is called for more than ever this year. As I sit here nursing a warm cup in my palms, I feel grateful for the privilege of having experienced festivals of light in so many different forms—it gives context and perspective to much cultural diversity and difference.
MIGHT THE LEGACY OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT INSPIRE HUMANKIND TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?
By Janne Blichert-Toft | December, 2023
My personal shock aside, this kind of conversation is not unique, nor a recent phenomenon. It is one of the reasons why the European Association of Geochemistry, now over a decade ago, came up with the Geochemical Perspectives booklet series, written on invitation-only by the more senior scientists of our geochemistry community (so admittedly, but by definition, not DEI compliant), to ensure that we commit the history, players, and evolution of our field to paper while still in living memory so as to pass on the foundation of our discipline to our students and early-career scientists—many of whom today do not seem to realize that the field of isotope geochemistry is rooted in the WWII Manhattan Project.
MAKING TIME TO CULTIVATE OUR INTERDISCIPLINARY CURIOSITY
By Becky Lange | October, 2023
Interdisciplinary research is often extolled and celebrated, including within the Earth and environmental sciences, but not always practiced in our educational programs. Last summer, I was able to participate, albeit in a small way, in an interdisciplinary approach to my department’s capstone environmental field course. It is one of several courses taught each summer at the University of Michigan’s field station in Wyoming. Owing to a last-minute change in personnel, I found myself part of the faculty line-up. I was not an obvious substitute as my research interests place me squarely in the “hard-rock, solid-Earth” side of my department, and not the “hydrological, surficial processes, environmental science” side. It was a delightful experience as it gave me the opportunity to learn new things (e.g., hydrology and chemistry of stream waters, slope stability and landslide hazards, etc.) and add some new course content, in large part inspired by this issue of Elements, “Large Igneous Provinces: Versatile Drivers of Global Change.”
NAVIGATING THE GLOBAL PAPER CRISIS
By Esther Posner | August, 2023
Toilet paper hasn’t been the only paper shortage to wreak havoc worldwide in recent years, although it has certainly received the most press coverage. Looming lockdowns in early 2020 sprung consumers into a paranoid frenzy to stock up on essentials (and what could be more essential than toilet paper?!), while simultaneously igniting a major spike in online purchasing.1 I’ll admit, as an American living in Germany I did the same thing. But it wasn’t the panicbuying of toilet paper that led to its shortage. Rather, the paper and pulp industry—while facing staff shortages, transportation delays, and social distancing limitations—was forced to shift production toward paperboard (i.e., cardboard) to meet the skyrocketing demand for e-commerce shipping material. Picture that ever-growing pile of light brown paperboard boxes and envelopes in your house and the tightly packed, yet overflowing paper recycling bins down the road. That is where the toilet paper went: into your shipping boxes.
IN SEARCH OF MIND-BLOWING SCIENCE
By Richard Harrison | June, 2023
When was the last scientific talk you saw that totally blew your mind? You know, the kind of talk that you walk away from of thinking, “Wow—this changes EVERYTHING!” For me, I can clearly remember every detail of a talk I saw over 20 years ago in Strasbourg and the very moment I realised that my future research trajectory was going to change forever as a result of what was being presented. The talk in question was by Mihály Pósfai, who had been awarded the 1999 European Mineralogical Union Medal for Research Excellence and was presenting his work of applying the technique of electron holography to directly image the magnetic state of magnetite nanoparticles in bacteria. The impact on me was immediate for two reasons: not only would the opportunities afforded by this new technique completely revolutionise my own research, but I also discovered that one of the world experts in holography worked just across the street from me. (Indeed, I could write a whole other editorial on the subject of why we often have to travel to a conference halfway around the world to hear about the science that is happening just down the corridor.)
THE POWER OF THE COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION OF HOMO SAPIENS!
By Becky Lange | April, 2023
The last 100 years of Homo sapiens history, which dates back more than 200,000 years, have been remarkable by any objective measure. For one, our population quadrupled from ~2 billion to ~8 billion strong (and counting). This population surge occurred in parallel with an astonishingly high rate of scientific discoveries and technological feats, including our new-found ability to edit and modify our own genetic code (and that of our offspring). The environmental impact of our ever[1]increasing “footprint” is also accelerating, as we usher in Earth’s sixth mass extinction since the Cambrian. At a time when rapid and unprece[1]dented change looms, it is compelling to take a moment to reflect on our species’ origin. Where did we come from? How did we arise? What led to our migration out of our ancestral continent and rapid colonization of all other land masses? These questions cannot be answered simply or briefly. But in this issue of Elements, “Into the Rift: The Geology of Human Origins in Eastern Africa,” we are reminded that all 8 billion of us have a shared ancestry and thus a shared humanity.
A WONDROUS JOURNEY TO THE ENIGMATIC, INTRIGUING SALTY PLAINS, PECULIAR MINERALS, AND MYSTERIOUS MICROBIAL INHABITANTS OF ALKALINE LAKES—AND THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET
By Janne Blichert-Toft | February, 2023
I am delighted to invite you with this issue of Elements on a stunning and fascinating expedition to one of Earth’s most extreme, remarkable, and puzzling environments: its alkaline lakes (Fig. 1), which find themselves at a multi-disciplinary interface between geology, geochemistry, mineralogy, biology, hydrology, and geomorphology. I thought I knew what alkaline lakes were all about—until I read the articles in this issue. Now, I know! I also now know not to confuse alkaline lakes with saline lakes, the former being a subset of the latter; a subtle distinction I had not quite appreciated before when using the two expressions interchangeably as if they were synonyms.
Jupiter’s Moon Io—A Humans's Guide?
Jupiter’s moon Io is a truly fascinating and unique world. Located just over 400,000 kilometers from the gas giant, it is the inner most of the four Galilean moons and the most volca nically active body in the solar system. Io’s surface is dotted with more than 150 active volcanoes, which spew out a variety of materials including sulfur, silicon, and methane. These eruptions have created vast plains of molten lava, as well as towering mountains and vast cal deras. The surface of Io is constantly changing due to these volcanic eruptions, making it one of the most dynamic and constantly evolving bodies in the solar system.
In the Shadow of War and Other Existential Challenges to Humankind
By Janne Blichert-Toft | October, 2022
When I was assigned this issue of Elements about a year ago to the date of writing this editorial, two things came to my mind straight away. First, the title. What a weird title, I thought, because concrete and cement are just two words for the same thing, right? Well… no! I found this out pretty quickly after talking to the Guest Editors and which you will learn too (if you did not know so already) by reading this issue. For those of you as ignorant as I was (but am not anymore!), the difference between cement and concrete, simply put, is that cement is a powder (the variable compositions of which you will learn if you read on) that, once mixed with water, sand, and gravel and poured into the rotating barrel of a truck, or cement mixer, becomes concrete!
Being Danish and having grown up in Denmark, the other thing that came to my mind when I was confronted with the word “concrete” was its place in history, which several of the articles in this issue also touch upon…
The Siren Call of Cascadia
National parks are surely one of the best ideas of the civilized world, right up there with the invention of writing and public education. Although the United States was the first country to create a national park (Yellowstone in 1872), it is far from having the largest number with its current count at 62. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s registered list, Australia leads the pack (685), followed by Thailand (147) and India (116) for the top three.
We urgently need these preserves now more than ever, not only to protect the biodiversity within them, but for our own sanity and wellbeing. Not surprisingly, the Cascadia subduction zone (the captivating subject of this issue of Elements) has more than its share of national parks per square kilometer.
One Mineral to Rule Them All
Your starter for ten: what is the connection between the minerals: olivine, garnet, ice, magnetite, and quetzal coatlite? Anyone?
Organic Geochemistry's Looming Test
If the Mars Sample Return program goes as planned, 11 years from now, a canister containing 40some samples of lake sediments and other rocks from the surface of Mars will land in Utah, and, after a (hope fully brief!) period of worrying about the imagined dangers of extraterrestrial microbes, these samples will be released for study in Earth’s laboratories. All sorts of scientists will approach these samples with all sorts of goals, but the question with arguably the biggest stakes, the broadest interest, and the greatest potential con sequences will be whether these rocks contain incontrovertible evidence of present or past life on Mars.
Beware the Bromides
With respect to Br, I was not meaningfully introduced to the term “bromide” until I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Not in chemistry lab, but rather in a Comparative Literature course. The term “bromide!” was scrawled in red, repeatedly, all over my essay on Moby Dick. Apparently, my deep, philosophical musings on Ahab’s obsessive quest were found to be “trite and unoriginal”. Oh dear! A wellearned, if stinging, instruction on how Br-bearing sedatives (no longer available due to their toxicity) entered the English lexicon to refer to boring and meaningless expressions, in large part due to Gelett Burgess’ 1906 essay, Are You a Bromide?
SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMONDS
By Richard Harrison | December 2021
A verbatim conversation with a new PhD student of mine, as they prepared to submit their very first paper for publication: Student: “Hey Rich, why does it say I have to pay $2,750 to submit my article?” Me: “Don’t worry, these are publication fees, not submission fees!” Student: “So, we have to pay to get published? Wow, this is ridiculous!” Me: “Welcome to the wonderful world of academic publishing—we do the research, write the papers, review them, edit the journal—all for free – then pay the journal to publish it and pay them again to read it…”
THE POWER OF MYSTERIOUS WORDS
By John Eiler | October 2021
One of the joys of growing up in a little-remarkedupon corner of the upper Midwest USA is that it came with its own secret words and rituals—cricks and bubblers, hotdishes and euchre. The Wisconsin patois served as a daily reminder that humans have a passion for using mysterious languages to express the numinous: cants and glossolalia that describe new things or express new ideas or emotions, and that draw lines, intentionally or otherwise, between the community of “insiders” and everyone else.
DID SHAKESPEARE GET IT WRONG?
By Becky Lange | August 2021
How many of us have had the chance this summer to look up into the night sky, far from the urban/suburban lights, to engage in some thought-provoking star gazing? Consulting the night sky was the habit of our forebears, for the dance of the stars gave valuable guidance: when to reap and when to sow, how long till dusk, how far from home, whether to engage in battle or in love. Though Shakespeare, for one, begged to differ when he wrote, “Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck”.
WHAT HAVE NEUTRONS EVER DONE FOR US?
By Richard Harrison |June 2021
I hereby call this extraordinary meeting of the Society for the Protection of Analytical Methods [SPAM] to order. Brothers and sisters, we face a grave threat. For decades, we’ve provided X-rays and electrons to study the structure and properties of natural materials – everything a mineralogist could ever dream of. But now this!
NATURE’S UNDERGROUND LIBRARIES
By Jon Blundy |April 2021
The city of Oxford (UK), where I have relocated since my last editorial, is a provincial metropolis of some 150,000 souls about 90 km northeast of London. Oxford is famous for its ancient collegiate university, with colleges dating back to 1096. The University of Oxford is slightly less well-known for its remarkable Bodleian Library, created in its present form in 1598 by Sir Thomas Bodley. It is one of just six copyright libraries in Britain and Ireland. A copyright library (or ‘library of legal deposit’) is one that, since 1662, has the right to request and store for posterity a copy of every new work published in English.
ALPS AS INSPIRATION
By John Eiler |February 2021
Looking down on the Earth from space, the Alps appear to be a small, and possibly unimportant, adornment to the tremendous girdle of “Alpide” orogens that stretch the full width of the southern margin of the Eurasian continent. But seen up close, and with historical perspective, the Alps punch far above their weight. From the deepest prehistory of our hominid ancestors to the modern age, the Alps have been a formidable barrier to trade, communication, migration, and conquest across the small, but storied, “peninsula” of Europe—a fact brought home for me when I recently toured a museum in Bolzano (Italy) dedicated to the life and remains of “Ötzi”, a man who met his end five thousand years ago in the high peaks and ice fields of the Ötztal Alps.
FLUIDS AND THE FIELD
By Richard Harrison |December 2020
As someone who firmly sits on the “Lab Rats– Computer Geeks” binary join of the geoscientist ternary diagram (Fig. 1), putting together this “Hydrothermal Fluids” issue of Elements has brought back some vivid memories of my yearly foray into field teaching. Faced with the task of explaining some complex, but fundamentally important, geological process encoded into the face of an outcrop, I would get the inevitable student question: “But why does that happen?” Invariably, my mumbled response would be, “Because of fluids….”.
A DATE FOR ODYSSEUS
By Jon Blundy |October 2020
Time is a big deal for us geologists. Rates of Earth processes range from the mind-numbingly slow (mantle convection) to the catas t rophical ly fas t (volcanic eruptions) with everything in between. Geologists move effortlessly from units of seconds to giga years in a way that often confounds scientists in other disciplines; no geologist is unaware of humanitys’ fleetingly brief tenure of the planet in the grand scheme of things.
POPPING THE GEOSCIENCES’ BUBBLE OF LIMITED DIVERSITY
By John M. Eiler |August 2020
One of the pleasures of serving as a principal editor of Elements is working with people from across the whole Earth science community, many from places, subjects and institutions who I wouldn’t encounter in the rest of my professorial life. This issue is a good example: its contributing authors and editors include men and women from four continents and seven countries, studying everything from isotope geochemistry to mining to advanced batteries to medical biochemistry, while working in universities, national labs, technology and mining companies, consulting agencies, and a medical center.
A SYMPHONY OF ELECTRONS
By Jon Blundy | June 2020
The concept of oxidation as the process that turns iron metal into rust is familiar to all of us. We might be equally familiar with reduction, the “reverse” of oxidation, by which iron metal is produced by heating iron ore with coke in a blast furnace. Rusting and smelting of iron are just two examples of reduction–oxidation (“redox”) reactions. As one species (e.g., the iron ore) becomes reduced, so the other (e.g., the coke) becomes oxidised. In redox, there is always something being oxidised and something else being reduced; it’s the yin and the yang of geochemistry, as the guest editors of this issue of Elements refer to it (cover).
OUR ACADEMIC FAMILY
By Nancy L. Ross | April 2020
This past year has seen the departure of many of our great colleagues who shaped the fields of mine r a log y, petrology, and geochemistry. They were part of our extended academic family and will be greatly missed. Although their academic contributions can be found in their curriculum vitae and scientific publications, their personal histories, the things that shaped their lives and careers, are more elusive. However, personal histories, where published, can capture the “human” aspect behind the scientist and include stories filled with happiness and humor, hardship and perseverance, and, above all, serendipity.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE HYDROGEN ECONOMY
By John M. Eiler | February 2020
I would like to know, now that we’ve reached the year 2020, where is the hydrogen economy I was promised? Hydrogen fuel cell cars lurk at the margins of the marketplace, and several governments and corporations continue to make large bets on hydrogen’s future, but as I look out the window at my battery assisted, hybrid car, I’m still left wondering “what went wrong”?
CARBON – BEAUTIFUL, ESSENTIAL, DEADLY
By Jon Blundy | December 2019
The unique physical chemistry of carbon confers an extraordinary ability to form molecules that are variously beautiful (think diamond), essential (think living cells), and toxic (think greenhouse gas). Nowhere is this split personality more evident than in the enigmatic igneous clan of kimberlites, the topic for this issue of Elements. No one who has set eyes on a cut diamond, especially the delicate pink stones from soon-to-close Argyle Mine in Western Australia (see photo to the right), can fail to be awestruck at Nature’s capacity for beauty. Kimberlite magmas that bring diamonds to the surface are carbonfuelled, whether by methane through a complex series of redox melting reactions (see Foley et al. 2019 this issue p. 393), or by carbon dioxide exsolving from kimberlite melt at sub-crustal depths and propelling it explosively to the surface (see Russell et al. 2019 this issue p. 405).
CELEBRATION OF THE PERIODIC TABLE
By Nancy Ross | October 2019
The periodic table of chemical elements is one of the most significant achievements in science because it arranges the 118 known elements in a deceptively simple pattern that reveals their properties. So how did this “Rosetta Stone of Nature” originate? Most likely, you will answer Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who in 1869 published a version of the periodic table that we recognize today. His table expresses the periodic law: elements arranged according to the size of their atomic weights show periodic properties. To celebrate the 150th-anniversary of this great achievement, the United Nations and UNESCO declared 2019 to be the International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements.
WEATHERING: EARTH’S INEXORABLE MILLSTONE
By John M. Eiler | August 2019
Mere centuries from now, almost every physical object you’ve bought or wrought will have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Nature’s forces will conspire to erase your archeological record. Unless you live in a stone manor, the foundations of your home will gradually crumble due to carbonic acid seeping into hairline cracks. Soil will migrate and turn over, shifting and consuming whatever objets d’art now grace your yard. Oxidation and sunlight will yellow and crack exposed plastic and paper. And everywhere, always, a teeming horde of plant roots, invertebrates, moles, and their microbial friends and relations will disaggregate and eat whatever they can. In the blink of a geological eye, almost your entire archaeological record will very likely be buried, broken down, and swept away.
HAIL HEPHAESTUS, INTERDISCIPLINARY DEITY!
By Jon Blundy | June 2019
The Aegean region of the Eastern Mediterranean can claim, with good reason, to be a cradle of modern civilisation and scholarship. As we learn in this issue of Elements, the Aegean is also home to some extraordinary geology, including Santorini Volcano whose Late Bronze Age eruption presaged (but did not actually cause, we learn on p. 185) the demise of the mighty Minoan dynasty on Crete. The socalled Minoan eruption was one of many eruptions from Aegean volcanoes that took place under the watchful eye of the Ancient Greek gods, not least Hephaestus, god of fire and son of Zeus.
DOES EARTH STILL OFFER DISCOVERIES?
By Friedhelm von Blanckenburg | April 2019
Imagine a geoscientist who begins his career as a mine surveyor but who quickly realizes that this was too small a field for him. So, he decides to take field trips, which last many years, to remote parts of the Earth. What our geoscientist discovers includes nothing less than the interactions between topography and climate, the alignment of volcanoes along zones of earthquake activity and at great depth, and three-quarters of all known plant species. Returning home, our geoscientist does not rest. Instead, he lets the world know of his spectacular discoveries. He becomes a prolific writer who publishes an immense number of articles and books, all the while discussing the implications of his findings in a dozen or more detailed letters a day with colleagues around the world.
MINERALOGICAL REVELATIONS FROM SPACE ODYSSEYS
By Nancy L. Ross | February 2019
Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917– 2008), perhaps best known for the 1968 book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, once stated that “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” As you enjoy this issue of Elements on planet Mercury, think about the remarkable achievement of sending a spacecraft to Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.
THE IRONY OF IRON – LIFE’S MAJOR TRACE ELEMENT
By Friedhelm von Blanckenburg | December 2018
All organisms, from lowly microbes to higher forms of life (including humans), need iron. Yet there is irony to iron. Despite being the second most abundant element in the Earth, it is not readily available for consumption. Earth owes this irony to the combined effects of geodynamics and biology. The early segregation of iron into the Earth’s core relegated iron to “only” the fourth most abundant element in the crust. About 2.3 billion years ago, a complex interplay between photosynthesis and redox changes in Earth’s mantle allowed the buildup of free atmospheric oxygen. Today, there is a sufficient supply of photosynthetic oxygen to convert all iron at the Earth’s surface and in its surface waters, including seawater, into its ferric [Fe(III)] form. This ferric form is barely soluble, making it hard to access by organisms. Ironically, life itself made iron a ‘trace element’.
THE “PLASTICENE” EPOCH?
By Nancy Ross | October 2018
This issue of Elements explores the fascinating realm of deep-ocean deposits that have the potential to provide society with many of the raw mineral resources required to meet the world’s growing needs. While raw materials have always, and always will, play a critical role in meeting these demands, materials made by humans have also become increasingly important, expanding in concert along with the world’s population, industry, and resource use. Most notably, plastics, which are synthetic organic polymers derived from fossil hydrocarbons, have become an indispensable part of our material world because of their remarkable number of uses and versatility. Plastic bottles, bags, credit cards, scotch tape, pipes, toys, to name a few, form part of our everyday life. Not surprisingly, the global production of plastic has increased from 2 metric tons (Mt) in 1950 to 380 Mt in 2015 (Geyer et al. 2017).
ETHICALLY SOURCED METALS
By Jon Blundy | August 2018
The Central Andes is a land of llamas, salt flats and majestic volcanic peaks. It is one of most remote places on Earth and arguably the driest. In a not unconnected way, the Central Andes is also home to the world’s largest copper mines. The unique combination of magmas, tectonics and climate, described in this issue of Elements, has conspired to create hydrothermal ore deposits that provide a third of the world’s copper and a quarter of its molybdenum (see “Ore Deposits of the Central Andes” by Lluis Fontbote on page 257).
THE MAKING OF GREAT WINE
By Bernard J. Wood | June 2018
As we set up the publication schedule for each year, the principal editors of Elements try to ensure that the journal maintains enough diversity to hold the interest of you, our readers. In this context, we sometimes accept proposals for issues on very well-known mainstream subjects (such as layered intrusions) which we think can usefully be updated and summarised at a good level. We also try, however, to bring you subjects which are outside the mainstream yet still can be grouped loosely within the areas of geochemistry, mineralogy and petrology. That is how we categorise the current issue dealing with the environmental aspects of making highquality wine.
THE EXCITEMENT OF SCIENCE DISCOVERIES IN THE BLUE SKY
By Friedhelm von Blanckenburg | April 2018
The articles in this “Comets” issue of Elements provide a fascinating account of comets and the making of our planetary system. We learn why comets are visible to the naked eye and about their complex organic geochemistry, the surprising find of free O2, and the likelihood of a comet impact on Earth. Perhaps most impressively, we learn about the tremendous effort that goes into the exploration of comets. These missions require decades of design, planning, and instrument miniaturization and their culmination captures our imagination in a way little else can. Who could not be enthralled by the evocatively named Stardust mission returning a few thousand grains of dust from comet Wild 2 to Earth? We collectively shared the despair when communication was lost from Rosetta’s Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, and the excitement about the unparalleled wealth of information sent back during its 70 hours of life on the comet’s surface.
FOOD FOR GEOLOGICAL THOUGHT
By Nancy L. Ross | February 2018
I recently asked a first-year student what the difference was between a rock and a mineral and he replied, “A rock is like a salad…” His immediate reply started me thinking about using food analogues to teach geological concepts. I subsequently found this approach has been widely studied and proven to be effective. For example, Baker et al. (2004) used the viscosities of common foods as analogues for silicate melts to help teach students about igneous processes.
YOUR NEXT CONFERENCE: COMBAT GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS AND STAY AT HOME
By Friedhelm von Blanckenburg | December 2017
Last year, I left a terrible carbon footprint. On top of an already travel-packed year, I flew from Berlin to San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting. With my >18,000 km round trip to San Francisco, I emitted ~2 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere (which alone amounts to the global per capita emissions required by 2050 to meet the 2 °C warming goal, not even counting my energy consumption for everyday life). The mood of the meeting, coming just after the US presidential election, was gloomy, amid grave concern over the future of international efforts to combat climate change. One attendee tweeted: “25,000 other geophysicists at #AGU16 in San Francisco. Zero of whom ask whether anthropogenic climate change is real.”
MINERAL RESOURCES AND THE LIMITS TO GROWTH
By Bernard J. Wood| October 2017
In writing an editorial for this issue on mineral resources, I was immediately reminded of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), a book that I read avidly from cover to cover as a young post-doc. For anybody interested in humanity’s effect on the environment and its near-term consequences, it is still a fascinating read. The authors summarised a computer model of the likely effects of sustained economic growth on the Earth and the human population. Based on historical data from 1900 to 1970, they observed exponential growth in total human population, resource consumption, food consumption, industrialisation and environmental pollution.
RETURN FROM THE “DARK SIDE”
By Nancy L. Ross| August 2017
In 2004, I assumed an administrative role in my university, thus joining what is commonly referred to as the “Dark Side” of academia. I have only just returned to my position as a faculty member. Some pursue administration as a career path and expect to move up the academic ladder, progressing from department head, to dean, to provost, and, perhaps, even to president. Others, like myself, view administration as an intriguing experiment: I certainly didn’t anticipate staying away from a faculty role for so long (almost 13 years). Like many faculty, I had little experience with organizational leadership when I joined the Dark Side. I was like a Padawan apprentice (another reference from Star Wars) aspiring to be a Jedi and greatly in need of master Yoda’s training.
SLEEPING BEAUTIES AND THE GRIND OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION
By Friedhelm von Blanckenburg| June 2017
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, paradigmshifting papers?
LITTLE BLACK BLOBS IN THE BACKGROUND
By Bernard J. Wood|April 2017
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. In this issue, therefore, the balance will be redressed as we review the complexity and beauty of sulfide mineralogy, geochemistry, and petrology. Elements has considered sulfur before (“Sulfur”, v6n2, 2010), but principally from environmental and biogeochemical standpoints. The current issue focusses more on sulfide behaviour in high-temperature environments, with just a single article devoted to sedimentary sulfides and environmental conditions in terrestrial oceans over geologic time (Rickard et al. 2017 this issue).
VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS AND WHAT TRIGGERS THEM
By Gordon E. Brown Jr.|February 2017
The north slope of Mount 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. Although relatively “minor” compared to other US eruptions (e.g. Yellowstone Supervolcano in Wyoming, USA), Mount St. Helens was the deadliest and most economically destructive eruption in United States’ history (Tilling et al. 1990): it killed 57 people, including U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) volcanologist Dr. David A. Johnston who was monitoring the volcano 6 miles north of Mount St. Helens. It’s somewhat ironic that Dave Johnston was killed “by an unusual eruptive event that was largely unanticipated, in magnitude or style, except perhaps by Dave himself” (Hildreth 1980).