Quick Search:    advanced search

GSW Home   GeoRef Home   My GSW Alerts   Contact GSW   About GSW   Journals List   Help

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Oelkers, E. H. Articles by Schott, J. Search for Related Content

PREFACE

This volume stems from a convergence of a number of factors. First, there is a compelling societal need to resuscitate the field of the thermodynamics and kinetics of natural processes. This field is essential to quantify and predict the response of the Earth’s surface and crust to the disequilibria caused by the various natural and anthropic inputs of energy to our planet. As such, it serves as the basis for sustainable development and assuring the quality of life on the Earth; it serves as the key to understanding the long term future of radioactive waste storage, toxic metal mobility in the environment, the fate of CO₂ injected into the subsurface as part of carbon sequestration efforts, quantifying the quality of petroleum reservoirs and generating novel methods of petroleum extraction, and the identification of new ore deposits. The recent interest in the weathering of continental surfaces and its impact on global elemental cycles and climate evolution has also brought new attention to the thermodynamics and kinetics of water-rock interactions as it has become evident that only a true mechanistic approach based on robust thermodynamic and kinetic laws and parameters can accurately model these processes. Yet, this field has, in many ways, atrophied over the past two decades. Relatively few students have pursued graduate research in this field; many of the great contributors to this field have retired or otherwise moved on. No doubt some of this atrophy was caused by economic factors. For roughly two decades from the mid-1980’s to the mid-2000’s the price of base metals and petroleum, when adjusted for inflation, were at lows not seen for over a generation. Some of this atrophy was also caused by past successes in this field; the development and success of computer generated thermodynamic databases, for example, giving the illusion that the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Eric H. Oelkers and Jacques Schott

Toulouse, France, May, 2009