Front Matter (PDF) - Elements

EDITORIAL
PRINCIPAL EDITORS
DAVID J. VAUGHAN, The University of
Manchester, UK (david.vaughan@
manchester.ac.uk)
HARRY Y. (Hap) McSWEEN, University of
Tennessee, USA (mcsween@utk.edu)
JAMES I. DREVER, University of Wyoming
(drever@uwy.edu)
SUSAN L. S. STIPP, Københavns Universitet,
Denmark (stipp@nano.ku.dk)
ADVISORY BOARD 2009
JOHN BRODHOLT, University College London
NORBERT CLAUER, CNRS/UdS, Université de
Strasbourg, France
ROBERTO COMPAGNONI, Università degli
Studi di Torino, Italy
WILL P. GATES, SmecTech Research
Consulting, Australia
GEORGE E. HARLOW, American Museum of
Natural History, USA
JANUSZ JANECZEK, University of Silesia, Poland
HANS KEPPLER, Bayerisches Geoinstitut,
Germany
DAVID R. LENTZ, University of New Brunswick,
Canada
MAGGI LOUBSER, University of Pretoria,
South Africa
ANHUAI LU, Peking University, China
ROBERT W. LUTH, University of Alberta, Canada
DAVID W. MOGK, Montana State University, USA
TAKASHI MURAKAMI, University of Tokyo, Japan
ROBERTA OBERTI, CNR Istituto di Geoscienze
e Georisorse, Pavia, Italy
ERIC H. OELKERS, LMTG/CNRS, France
TERRY PLANK, Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, USA
XAVIER QUEROL, Spanish Research Council, Spain
TORSTEN VENNEMANN, Université de
Lausanne, Suisse
OLIVIER VIDAL, Université J. Fourier, France
MEENAKSHI WADHWA, Arizona State
University, USA
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
LIANE BENNING, European Association
of Geochemistry
PETER C. BURNS, Mineralogical Association
of Canada
GIUSEPPE CRUCIANI, Società Italiana di
Mineralogia e Petrologia
BARBARA L. DUTROW, Mineralogical
Society of America, Chair
W. CRAWFORD ELLIOTT, The Clay Minerals Society
RODNEY C. EWING, Founder
CATHERINE MÉVEL, Société Française
de Minéralogie et de Cristallographie
MAREK MICHALIK, Mineralogical Society
of Poland
MANUEL PRIETO, Sociedad Española
de Mineralogía
CLEMENS REIMANN, International Association
of GeoChemistry
URS SCHALTEGGER, Swiss Society of
Mineralogy and Petrology
CLIFFORD R. STANLEY, Association
of Applied Geochemists
NEIL C. STURCHIO, Geochemical Society
PETER TRELOAR, Mineralogical
Society of Great Britain and Ireland
FRIEDHELM VON BLANCKENBURG,
Deutsche Mineralogische Gesellschaft
MICHAEL WIEDENBECK, International
Association of Geoanalysts
MANAGING EDITOR
PIERRETTE TREMBLAY, tremblpi@ete.inrs.ca
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The opinions expressed in this maga zine are
those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the publishers.
www.elementsmagazine.org
EVOLUTION AND EXTINCTION
The subject matter of this
issue of Elements, like many
excellent ideas, will seem
obvious to other scientists
when put before them. Its
elegance makes it appear
simple. Mineral evolution
provides a sense of progress,
or at least of a progression
from the simple to the
complex, since the explosive
beginnings of our uni-
David J. Vaughan
verse. The idea of a process
of ‘evolution’ that extends back in time for many
billions of years before the emergence of any life
form on Earth is particularly apt at a time when
we have just celebrated the bicentenary of the
birth of Charles Darwin, the man who essentially
gave us biological evolution.
However, there is at least one very
important difference between the
evolutionary development of life
forms and that described here for
minerals: it is that minerals, however
rare, cannot become extinct,
whereas for living organisms
extinction is the rule rather than
the exception. Probably more than
99% of all the organisms that have
ever lived are now extinct.
So what can we say about the Earth
and its ‘systems’ in the context of
evolution and extinction at the beginning of the
year 2010 Chiefly that Earth is a planet dominated
by one mammalian species whose actions
have already led to the extinction of numerous
life forms and threatened the extinction of many
others. At the time of writing this editorial, the
Copenhagen Conference on climate change has
just ended with little real progress towards
dealing with the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions
as the cause of potentially catastrophic
changes in global climate, sea level, ocean currents
and ocean chemistry. I will not dignify the
arguments of the tiny handful of ‘climate-change
deniers’ with an attack on their follies – their case
has been discredited in numerous books and
articles, including many in this magazine. If
global warming continues unchecked, this will
have a devastating impact on the survival prospects
of millions of people and could even portend
the ‘extinction’ of Homo sapiens. The unfortunate
lesson of Copenhagen seems simply to be
that our remarkable technological development
has not been matched by the evolution of the
social and political systems needed to deal with
global problems, particularly if they involve politicians
having to make unpopular decisions.
Minerals, however
rare, cannot become
extinct, whereas for
living organisms
extinction is the rule
rather than the
exception.
What, if anything, might we do as scientists in
the face of this unprecedented challenge Clearly
there is the possibility of contributing to technological
‘fixes’, which include the capture and
storage of greenhouse gases emitted from power
plants and vehicles, the development of alternative
(green) forms of energy, helping to solve
problems associated with existing low- or zeroemission
energy forms (notably the waste-disposal
problems of the nuclear industry), and even
novel ways of modifying Earth’s atmosphere or
the input of heat from the Sun. The latter might
involve some means of directly extracting CO 2
from the atmosphere and disposing of it in the
deep ocean, in deep sedimentary formations, or
through reaction with Mg and Ca in silicate rocks
such as basalts. Other novel proposals include
‘geoengineering’ stratocumulus clouds by
injecting into them a fine spray of
sea salt from the ocean surface
which would act as nuclei to
increase the number of water droplets
and cause them to reflect more
of the Sun’s heat. However, at
present, some deus ex machina total
solution to our climate problems
seems very unlikely. We will surely
need to call upon many of these
ways of reducing the impact of our
human activities on the global climate.
We will also have to accept
the need to make changes in our
lifestyles and the need to help our more threatened
neighbours in poorer countries, both technically
and financially. Amongst the most important
things we can do is to waste no opportunity
to educate our fellow citizens about the dangers
we all face and the terrible price we may all pay
for inaction. It is astonishing, so the pollsters tell
us, that very many of the general public either
do not ‘believe’ in global warming and its consequences
or think that it does not pose a serious
threat to our survival.
The mineral world is remarkably beautiful, but
even those of us who spend our working lives
studying it would not wish to see it ‘evolve’ to
outlast the living world.
David J. Vaughan*
The University of Manchester
david.vaughan@manchester.ac.uk
* David Vaughan was the principal editor in charge
of this issue.
ELEMENTS 3
FEBRUARY 2010