TOWARD A STABLE EARTH SYSTEM … OR A JOURNEY TO POINTS UNKNOWN?
By Patricia Dove | December, 2015
Dear Friends. As our final issue of Elements goes to press for 2015, the news bulletins over the past year call out for introspection about the future. For example, critical events have precipitated a tremendous migration from the Middle East to points unknown. This massive current of humanity is a reminder of the broader fact that our entire civilization has embarked on an uncharted journey. As the year ends with seven billion people, we continue the march to a world population of nine billion within only 35 years.
RESOURCES AND WAR
By Bernard Wood | October, 2015
In September 2015, we in Europe are being continually reminded of the plight of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who are arriving at the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. Many are paying large amounts of money and risking their lives to be smuggled in small boats to Greece and Italy in the hope of finding safety from war. On reading some of the background to the Syrian conflict, I was struck by the likely influence of a shortage of resources in this Middle Eastern region. In a recent article, Kelley et al. (2015) argue that the war in Syria, which has multiple causes, has been greatly exacerbated by a multiyear drought between 2007 and 2011. The authors of the paper consider that long-term trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure imply that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ and made the occurrence of a severe 3-year drought several times more likely than by natural variability alone.
BOUNTIES FROM THE EARTH
By Gordon Brown | August, 2015
Most of us, including me, use the products of modern technology without fully appreciating what raw Earth materials are required to make a cell phone, a modern internal combustion engine, an aluminum beer can, or the concrete used in buildings. Moreover, many of us don’t know much about the processes by which these common products and materials are made, such as the electrolytic production of aluminum from bauxite (discovered by Hall and Héroult in 1886), or the production of electronic-grade, single-crystal silicon needed to make silicon semiconductors. In a more general sense, many of us don’t fully appreciate the role played by geochemical and mineralogical processes in concentrating Nature’s bounty of raw materials into the form of metal, mineral, and hydrocarbon deposits that are increasingly needed by the 7.4 billion humans currently inhabiting Earth.
GROWING PAINS IN THE ERA OF BIG DATA
By Patricia Dove | June, 2015
In the five seconds it takes you to read this sentence our global community will have generated another 800 trillion bytes of data. This year alone, the world will add 5 trillion gigabytes—that’s 5 zettabytes or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes—to the ongoing, frenzy of data accumulation (VASEM 2015). No wonder everyone is talking about “big data” and the expanding toolbox of “big data analytics.”
TIME’S ARROW AND TIME’S CYCLE
By John W. Valley | April, 2015
Are geological processes cyclical or random? This seemingly simple question represents an ancient philosophical dichotomy. For example, Gould (1987) reexamined the metaphor of “time’s arrow” when discussing what James Hutton and Charles Lyell had to say on deep time. “Time’s arrow” describes history that is an “irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events,” while “time’s cycle” suggests that events “are parts of repeating cycles, and differences of the past will be realities of the future (and thus) time has no direction.” Hutton’s views are clear: if there is “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” and “the present is the key to the past,” cyclicity is required. The rock cycle includes the progression of uplift, erosion, deposition, lithification, and more uplift, much as Hutton envisioned for the famous unconformity at Siccar Point on the coast near Edinburgh (Scotland), his most convincing evidence for uniformitarianism.
HAS LIFE EVER EXISTED ON MARS?
By Gordon E. Brown, Jr. | February, 2015
This issue of Elements presents some of the remarkable scientific findings of the Martian rover Curiosity, which landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. In preparing my editorial for the Mars issue, I felt compelled to reread the classic science fiction novel by H. G. Wells entitled The War of the Worlds. First published in 1898, this novel was about the invasion (Book One) and subjugation (Book Two) of Earth by extraterrestrials—in this case Martians—each of whom had two large dark eyes, a lipless mouth that “quivered and dropped saliva,” tentacles, “oily brown skin,” very large brains, and rounded bodies about 1.2 m in diameter (Wells 1898). Wells’ sci-fi thriller was essentially a metaphor for some of the major social, scientific, and technological changes occurring in the late 19th century (Taglieri 2012). This tale was set in Victorian London and the nearby countryside, and had Martians landing near London in metal cylinders.