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Advances in oxide and sulfide mineral surface chemistry
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Vol. 67, No. 5, p. 797, 2003 Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0016-7037/03 $30.00 ⫹ .00
Pergamon
doi:10.1016/S0016-7037(02)01198-5
Advances in Oxide and Sulfide Mineral Surface Chemistry UDO BECKER1 and KEVIN M. ROSSO2 1
2
Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA W. R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
common use. It has now been just more than a decade since the first scanning tunneling microscopy images of mineral surfaces were collected. These and many other milestones are now coming to pass so fast that there is a pressing need for the occasional distillation and highlighting of results. Contributions to this issue are a kind of “fallout” from these very fruitful past few years. On the opposite side of the coin, it is clear that we have a long way to go before many of the answers that are needed are obtained to a degree of real satisfaction. It is our view that fundamental research on the structure, properties, and reactive behavior of mineral surfaces must be sustained for many more years if we are ever to fully understand the complex systems on which we all work. Thus, as a second inspiring factor, we hope that this issue will be taken as a reminder of that fact. Along the same lines, we kindly assert that funding initiatives, drift as they may, will find in the end that surfaces are here to stay. We are grateful to Frank A. Podosek and the rest of the GCA editorial staff for their welcome of this special issue and tireless support with its production.
This special issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, focused on mineral surfaces, is due in part to a highly successful topical symposium entitled “Advances in Oxide and Sulfide Mineral Surface Geochemistry,” held at the 2001 Goldschmidt meeting in Hot Springs, Virginia. Authors who contributed to the symposium were invited to also contribute a manuscript of their choosing to the current issue, with an emphasis on substantial forward developments. The symposium and this issue have been inspired by several factors. Many remarkable findings have been made available on mineral surfaces in the past decade or so. For example, we have seen an unveiling of the molecular-scale processes occurring during adsorption and oxidation of sulfide mineral surfaces for the first time. We have also witnessed the birth of controversy regarding the atomic structure of what is probably the most well-studied of the iron oxide surfaces, the hematite basal plane. Synthetic surfaces grown by molecular beam epitaxy or vapor deposition have substantially increased our ability to generate various mineral surfaces of interest, computing power for molecular modeling has increased dramatically, and very powerful surface analytical tools such as synchrotron-based methods have come into
797
Pergamon
doi:10.1016/S0016-7037(02)01198-5
Advances in Oxide and Sulfide Mineral Surface Chemistry UDO BECKER1 and KEVIN M. ROSSO2 1
2
Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA W. R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
common use. It has now been just more than a decade since the first scanning tunneling microscopy images of mineral surfaces were collected. These and many other milestones are now coming to pass so fast that there is a pressing need for the occasional distillation and highlighting of results. Contributions to this issue are a kind of “fallout” from these very fruitful past few years. On the opposite side of the coin, it is clear that we have a long way to go before many of the answers that are needed are obtained to a degree of real satisfaction. It is our view that fundamental research on the structure, properties, and reactive behavior of mineral surfaces must be sustained for many more years if we are ever to fully understand the complex systems on which we all work. Thus, as a second inspiring factor, we hope that this issue will be taken as a reminder of that fact. Along the same lines, we kindly assert that funding initiatives, drift as they may, will find in the end that surfaces are here to stay. We are grateful to Frank A. Podosek and the rest of the GCA editorial staff for their welcome of this special issue and tireless support with its production.
This special issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, focused on mineral surfaces, is due in part to a highly successful topical symposium entitled “Advances in Oxide and Sulfide Mineral Surface Geochemistry,” held at the 2001 Goldschmidt meeting in Hot Springs, Virginia. Authors who contributed to the symposium were invited to also contribute a manuscript of their choosing to the current issue, with an emphasis on substantial forward developments. The symposium and this issue have been inspired by several factors. Many remarkable findings have been made available on mineral surfaces in the past decade or so. For example, we have seen an unveiling of the molecular-scale processes occurring during adsorption and oxidation of sulfide mineral surfaces for the first time. We have also witnessed the birth of controversy regarding the atomic structure of what is probably the most well-studied of the iron oxide surfaces, the hematite basal plane. Synthetic surfaces grown by molecular beam epitaxy or vapor deposition have substantially increased our ability to generate various mineral surfaces of interest, computing power for molecular modeling has increased dramatically, and very powerful surface analytical tools such as synchrotron-based methods have come into
797