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, paradigm shifting 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 sorosilicate’s 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).