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A few weeks ago we revamped the table in Abundance of elements in Earth's crust. In discussing those changes, the related problem of the relative abundance of elements in individual or group pages on elements was raised.
As you may know, a determined IP user has been adding unsourced lines like:
to elements like Hafnium, Europium, Erbium and so on and on. These have been reverted. I removed a bunch more over the weekend.
A few pages, eg Lead have sources for relative abundance. The two sources that do give explicit relative abundance are Elmsley "Nature's building blocks : an A-Z guide to the elements" 2011 and Greenwood and Earnshaw (1997). Chemistry of the Elements (2nd ed.) There may be more. I don't know if the numbers in Elmsley vs Greenwood and Earnshaw agree.
I have not found any scientific or textbook discussion of relative abundance, but all of the primary and secondary sources on abundance make the point that the concentrations vary widely. The CRC handbook reports "median" values across multiple sources, saying something like "values of the less abundant elements may vary with location by several orders of magnitude."
In my opinion ranking the less abundant elements is not "knowledge" because the numerical value reported creates an illusion of solidity contrary to the evidence. Unfortunately our options are limited by the sources. For example we can't say "Hafnium is the around the 45th most abundant element in the crust" because that is not what the source says.
Some options for discussion:
(I picked Elmsley because its available online). While I would prefer to omit this "factoid" and in option 2, I lean to option 4 though I suppose our determined editor will just find some other way to "contribute".
Thoughts? Johnjbarton ( talk) 16:22, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Iodine is considerably less abundant than the lighter halogens both in the earth's crust and in the hydrosphere. It comprises 0.46 ppm of the crustal rocks and is sixtieth in order of abundance (cf. Tl 0.7, Tm 0.5, In 0.24, Sb 0.2).
References
Are these two articles the same topic? The article on the
Bølling–Allerød warming currently begins The Bølling–Allerød interstadial (Danish: [ˈpøle̝ŋ ˈæləˌʁœðˀ]), also called the Late Glacial Interstadial...
which implies that it is exactly the same topic as the
Late Glacial Interstadial article. If this is the case, then these two articles are clearly duplicates and should be merged. However, reading the academic literature, the term "Bølling–Allerød warming" seems to apply specifically to the sharp warming episode at the begnning of the interstadial, though I am not sure that would warrant a standalone article from the interstadial itself.
Hemiauchenia (
talk)
20:48, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
I found the Monzogranite article filled with too many details and too much jargon. Attempted to clean it up, but it's still missing the "big picture" of what monzogranite is and why it's interesting (if it is interesting). Having an expert in petrology look at it could be helpful. Thanks! — hike395 ( talk) 05:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
I applied this template to
Bølling–Allerød Interstadial today, after first spotting it at the Allerød oscillation stub (now merged to the Interstadial article.) It's a neat template, but I am not quite sure how it does some unit conversions. I.e. based on Figure 2 of
this Nature study, I set the mean CO2 concentration for 235 ppm - and the infobox automatically wrote that this was 1 times pre-industrial
- even though the actual preindustrial CO2 level was at ~280 ppm.
On the other hand, I tried work backwards for Mean surface temperature parameter. The same figure in the same paper stated that the temperature was ~1.5C lower than the early Holocene mean (which appears practically the same as the preindustrial based on Figure 6 here, so I wanted to set a value that would be described as "2.5 below modern" or thereabouts. Yet, somehow, it didn't work - setting the temperature at 12C results in "2 C below modern", yet 11.5 somehow results in "3 below modern". How does that work?
Lastly, it's probably not a good idea that CO2 concentration is described relative to preindustrial, yet temperature relative to "modern". It would obviously need regular updates for the foreseeable future to avoid becoming misleading, yet even if those updates are being done, there is no way to tell at a glance whether the temperature value the infobox considers "modern" in fact matches the present-day temperature value (which, lest we forget, continues to rise). InformationToKnowledge ( talk) 16:34, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
|CO2=
in the infobox --- it will supply one additional significant figure if the concentration is less then 560ppm.Sea level above present daycaption. Can we both account for units/negative values and change this line in the template to something more neutral, as we presumably want this infobox to be usable for glacial periods when the sea level was well below the present (or preindustrial, for consistency with the temperature/CO2 lines?) and not just for the hothouse periods? InformationToKnowledge ( talk) 14:50, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
|sea_level=
may accept non-numeric values (e.g., a call to {{
convert}}). In parallel to other infoboxes, I created a new parameter, |sea_level_m=
, which accepts only a numeric value and does what you've asked for, above. Feel free to use it. —
hike395 (
talk)
22:16, 14 June 2024 (UTC)References
I've added sections and edited others on the Cambrian page and I've 2 requests: One, can someone with more coding nous than me add a ICS (global) subdivisions table cf. Ordovician or Carboniferous please. Gives the info nice and concisely; and two, there are at least two other Cambrian pages that are now obsolete Stratigraphy of the Cambrian and Early Cambrian geochemical fluctuations. Again, could someone with more knowledge of Wikipedian ways delete them. Just to tidy things up. Thx Silica Cat ( talk) 15:06, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
In reverting my change @ Silica Cat claimed:
I assume that means Category:Geological_periods. I also infer (because I don't know where the standard policy is) that the "standard structure" puts "Geology" first, but only includes a single section "Stratigraphy", the content actually being chronostratigraphy in a very dry and detailed presentation.
Placing stratigraphy early makes all of the articles dull for normal readers. I'm sure geologists are very excited about stratigraphy, but we should try to make the articles approachable for non-experts. The early parts of the article should be about the most interesting and least technical aspects of a given period. Johnjbarton ( talk) 18:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
Volcanism of the Mount Edziza volcanic complex is at FAC if anyone is interested in participating. Volcano guy 15:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Slate Islands#Requested move 14 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂 • [𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺] 22:42, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
Main | Organization | Participants | Open tasks | Assessment | Peer reviews | Resources | Showcase |
![]() | Geology Project‑class | ||||||
|
|
![]() | WikiProject Geology was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 6 May 2013. |
This page has archives. Sections older than 60 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 8 sections are present. |
A few weeks ago we revamped the table in Abundance of elements in Earth's crust. In discussing those changes, the related problem of the relative abundance of elements in individual or group pages on elements was raised.
As you may know, a determined IP user has been adding unsourced lines like:
to elements like Hafnium, Europium, Erbium and so on and on. These have been reverted. I removed a bunch more over the weekend.
A few pages, eg Lead have sources for relative abundance. The two sources that do give explicit relative abundance are Elmsley "Nature's building blocks : an A-Z guide to the elements" 2011 and Greenwood and Earnshaw (1997). Chemistry of the Elements (2nd ed.) There may be more. I don't know if the numbers in Elmsley vs Greenwood and Earnshaw agree.
I have not found any scientific or textbook discussion of relative abundance, but all of the primary and secondary sources on abundance make the point that the concentrations vary widely. The CRC handbook reports "median" values across multiple sources, saying something like "values of the less abundant elements may vary with location by several orders of magnitude."
In my opinion ranking the less abundant elements is not "knowledge" because the numerical value reported creates an illusion of solidity contrary to the evidence. Unfortunately our options are limited by the sources. For example we can't say "Hafnium is the around the 45th most abundant element in the crust" because that is not what the source says.
Some options for discussion:
(I picked Elmsley because its available online). While I would prefer to omit this "factoid" and in option 2, I lean to option 4 though I suppose our determined editor will just find some other way to "contribute".
Thoughts? Johnjbarton ( talk) 16:22, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Iodine is considerably less abundant than the lighter halogens both in the earth's crust and in the hydrosphere. It comprises 0.46 ppm of the crustal rocks and is sixtieth in order of abundance (cf. Tl 0.7, Tm 0.5, In 0.24, Sb 0.2).
References
Are these two articles the same topic? The article on the
Bølling–Allerød warming currently begins The Bølling–Allerød interstadial (Danish: [ˈpøle̝ŋ ˈæləˌʁœðˀ]), also called the Late Glacial Interstadial...
which implies that it is exactly the same topic as the
Late Glacial Interstadial article. If this is the case, then these two articles are clearly duplicates and should be merged. However, reading the academic literature, the term "Bølling–Allerød warming" seems to apply specifically to the sharp warming episode at the begnning of the interstadial, though I am not sure that would warrant a standalone article from the interstadial itself.
Hemiauchenia (
talk)
20:48, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
I found the Monzogranite article filled with too many details and too much jargon. Attempted to clean it up, but it's still missing the "big picture" of what monzogranite is and why it's interesting (if it is interesting). Having an expert in petrology look at it could be helpful. Thanks! — hike395 ( talk) 05:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
I applied this template to
Bølling–Allerød Interstadial today, after first spotting it at the Allerød oscillation stub (now merged to the Interstadial article.) It's a neat template, but I am not quite sure how it does some unit conversions. I.e. based on Figure 2 of
this Nature study, I set the mean CO2 concentration for 235 ppm - and the infobox automatically wrote that this was 1 times pre-industrial
- even though the actual preindustrial CO2 level was at ~280 ppm.
On the other hand, I tried work backwards for Mean surface temperature parameter. The same figure in the same paper stated that the temperature was ~1.5C lower than the early Holocene mean (which appears practically the same as the preindustrial based on Figure 6 here, so I wanted to set a value that would be described as "2.5 below modern" or thereabouts. Yet, somehow, it didn't work - setting the temperature at 12C results in "2 C below modern", yet 11.5 somehow results in "3 below modern". How does that work?
Lastly, it's probably not a good idea that CO2 concentration is described relative to preindustrial, yet temperature relative to "modern". It would obviously need regular updates for the foreseeable future to avoid becoming misleading, yet even if those updates are being done, there is no way to tell at a glance whether the temperature value the infobox considers "modern" in fact matches the present-day temperature value (which, lest we forget, continues to rise). InformationToKnowledge ( talk) 16:34, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
|CO2=
in the infobox --- it will supply one additional significant figure if the concentration is less then 560ppm.Sea level above present daycaption. Can we both account for units/negative values and change this line in the template to something more neutral, as we presumably want this infobox to be usable for glacial periods when the sea level was well below the present (or preindustrial, for consistency with the temperature/CO2 lines?) and not just for the hothouse periods? InformationToKnowledge ( talk) 14:50, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
|sea_level=
may accept non-numeric values (e.g., a call to {{
convert}}). In parallel to other infoboxes, I created a new parameter, |sea_level_m=
, which accepts only a numeric value and does what you've asked for, above. Feel free to use it. —
hike395 (
talk)
22:16, 14 June 2024 (UTC)References
I've added sections and edited others on the Cambrian page and I've 2 requests: One, can someone with more coding nous than me add a ICS (global) subdivisions table cf. Ordovician or Carboniferous please. Gives the info nice and concisely; and two, there are at least two other Cambrian pages that are now obsolete Stratigraphy of the Cambrian and Early Cambrian geochemical fluctuations. Again, could someone with more knowledge of Wikipedian ways delete them. Just to tidy things up. Thx Silica Cat ( talk) 15:06, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
In reverting my change @ Silica Cat claimed:
I assume that means Category:Geological_periods. I also infer (because I don't know where the standard policy is) that the "standard structure" puts "Geology" first, but only includes a single section "Stratigraphy", the content actually being chronostratigraphy in a very dry and detailed presentation.
Placing stratigraphy early makes all of the articles dull for normal readers. I'm sure geologists are very excited about stratigraphy, but we should try to make the articles approachable for non-experts. The early parts of the article should be about the most interesting and least technical aspects of a given period. Johnjbarton ( talk) 18:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
Volcanism of the Mount Edziza volcanic complex is at FAC if anyone is interested in participating. Volcano guy 15:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Slate Islands#Requested move 14 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂 • [𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺] 22:42, 14 July 2024 (UTC)