Geological themes in need of more attention

Abstract

Episodes has published many excellent articles on relevant, provocative, and interesting geological themes in Special Issues (SIs). The IUGS Publications Committee and editorial team have endeavored to publish SIs regularly; however, it has remained inconsistent (Table 1). The themes of the Sis published in this journal include natural stones, asbestos, the geodynamic evolution of the Indian subcontinent, forensic geology, the great mineral fields of Africa, ophiolites, global heritage stone resources, catastrophic tsunamis, geology of the Oceania, and Nordic geoscience (see Table 1). Each SI contains 7 to 43 articles with a mean of 17. A Google Scholar search revealed that currently, each SI has been cited 12 to 1,099 times (mean = 252). Each article in the Sis has been cited 1.71 to 37.89 times. The SIs celebrating the International Geological Congress (IGC), held every four years, were a great success with regard to the citations by other studies.

Emerging Contaminants in Soil and Groundwater Systems Occurrence, Impact, Fate and Transport edited by Bin Gao

“…It is expected that their occurrence, fate and transport characteristics would be very different from those of conventional and typical contaminants such as metals, organics, and nutrients (Chia et al, 2021(Chia et al, , 2022. However, it is not rarely known and studied much about the emerging ones (Lee et al, 2021(Lee et al, , 2022a. The lack of knowledge and experiences with them adds difficulties in devising mitigation measures.…”

Microplastics in soil and groundwater of Korea: Occurrence, characteristics and risk assessment

“…Microplastics (MPs), which are plastics measuring less than 5 mm in size, are ubiquitous in the environment (Chia et al, 2021;Cha et al, 2023;Kim et al, 2023). Initially, concerns and interests regarding MPs primarily focused on oceans; however, they have now extended to terrestrial environments, including rivers, streams, lakes, groundwater, and agricultural fields (Horton et al, 2017;Chia et al, 2022a;Lee, 2022;Lee et al, 2022). Rresearch on the occurrence, distribution, fate, and transport of MPs in terrestrial environments is crucial for developing effective control and mitigation strategies, but such investigations are still in the early stages (Lee, 2022).…”