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.