WHEN CONTINENTS AND CONCEPTS COLLIDE
Tom Sisson | December 2025
This issue of Elements tells the story of the Paleozoic welding of Laurussia and Gondwana to form Earth’s last supercont inent, Pangaea—an event neither simple nor brief. Like a Shakespearean drama, one can anticipate the penultimate climax, but the path there is marked by the innocent being trapped between opposing great forces, some characters changing sides, mysterious chemical and petrologic changes, and an unexpected twist at the end.
CLIMBING UP ON THE MOON
Sumit Chakraborty | October 2025
I grew up with the Bengali phrase “Haate Chand peyechi.” Literally, this translates to “I’ve got a piece of the Moon in my hands;” idiomatically, it says that a dream has come true. In my later life as an Earth and planetary scientist, I have been able to make use of that word play with my friends and relatives—when asked how things have been going, I could reply, truthfully, that there had been ups and downs but that I had also held some pieces of the Moon in my hands. When a human hand first held a piece of the Moon, I was a child in school. We saw the pictures and figured that while our dares consisted of jumping across forbidden walls and stealing fruit from gardens, grown-up playing involved jumping across planetary boundaries and gathering stones.
EMBRACING RISK—AND REFLECTING ON MY TENURE AS PRINCIPAL EDITOR FOR ELEMENTS
Janne Blichert-Toft | August 2025
The topic of this issue of Elements is a perfect example of how the emergence of a new measurement technique can unlock a range of previously inaccessible and sometimes even previously unimaginable research areas. This often coincides with technological innovations, although not exclusively. It can also occur, as in this case, when existing technology is utilized in novel ways. Our geoscience disciplines— geochemistry, petrology, and mineralogy— have advanced significantly due to this positive cause-and-effect relationship.
TROUBLE WRITING THAT PAPER? GO TO THE ART MUSEUM
Tom Sisson | June 2025
I know little about the theory and history of art, but I saw this quote recently in an exhibition of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, and it struck me—putting aside that we are a generation beyond newspapers being delivered to our doorsteps—that it could have been said about science, or more particularly about influential science. Thebaud alludes to Prometheus, a Titan, stealing fire from the Olympian gods and gifting it to people, a myth that is usually taken to account for humans having not just fire but all of technology (science), the ability to create it (the scientific method), and the benefits and costs therefrom. Thiebaud shifts the responsibility, however, in that Prometheus is an undependable paper carrier, so if we want art or science, we must go up Mount Olympus ourselves and take it. Scientific revelation requires effort, but it can still feel like having stolen knowledge: After much striving, sometimes long and obscure, a deeper understanding can appear without our fully grasping how we arrived at that knowledge. We must then trace our route back to that understanding to convince ourselves and others that it approaches being true in important respects. Mythology and religion are crowded with entities who gained knowledge usually through some act of disobedience, clever trick, or bad bargain. Almost all of them then suffer for it: Odin sacrifices an eye for deep knowledge, Cassandra sees the future, but no one believes her, and poor Prometheus ends up bound to a rock, visited every day by an eagle who eats his regrown liver.
PERSONIFYING THE ELEMENTS AND OTHER NON-TRADITIONAL WAYS TO SHARE SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Esther Posner | April 2025
As a geology student gazing out at the vast ocean of information, I often found myself personifying certain scientific concepts and processes. Albeit end member nerdy, I still to this day find myself envisioning the elements of the periodic table to have humanlike personalities—introverts, extroverts, and each with a range of comfort levels and associated behaviors depending on (1) other nearby element personalities (i.e., who else is in the room) and (2) their surroundings, similar to how people with different personality types might respond to, for example, being packed in a highenergy dance party versus isolated in a lowenergy library. In my imagination, the ways in which the elements interact resemble a whole gamut of human relationships—passionate love affairs, enemies that actively avoid each other, clingy or hyperactive children, and let us not forget the “plagioclase love triangle,” with Ca2+ and K+ both biding for the affection of Na+.
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.