The Earth Scientist’s Periodic Table of the Elements and Their Ions is a fundamentally new table that was first published in 2003 in the Geological Society of America’s (GSA) prominent journal Geology (Railsback 2003). The new table was reported in Nature, it was featured in a cover article by Science News, it was included among Discover magazine’s 100 Top Science Stories of 2003, and its publication was noted in many other magazines and online outlets. GSA sold a large number of reprints of the 2003 paper and then, in 2004, published a revised version of the table in GSA’s Map and Chart Series (Railsback 2004). When GSA’s printed stock ran low, the Society published a further revised version of the table in its Map and Chart Series in 2011 (Railsback 2011). The table has been translated into Chinese (Jin 2006), Spanish (Bernal and Railsback 2008), Portuguese (Franco de Souza Lima and Railsback 2012), and German. The original 2003 paper has been cited in journals ranging from Journal of Mathematical Chemistry to Carbohydrate Research to Geomicrobiology Journal to Journal of Arid Environments to Resource Geology to Reviews in Geophysics, and it has proven useful in understanding the topology of the periodic table (Restrepo et al. 2006). The success of the new Earth Scientist’s Periodic Table of the Elements and Their Ions across the past decade suggests that the periodic table, as a general concept, is not a static document but instead is still subject to evolution, especially as scientific fields beyond traditional chemistry increasingly use chemical perspectives. It further suggests that volumes like this one are not simply retrospective ruminations on a nineteenth-century invention, but instead they can be part of an ongoing process to find new meaning in the periodic concept and to make it more applicable in broader contexts in the twenty-first century. Despite the diversity of periodic tables produced over the last 140 years (e.g., Mazurs 1974), the Earth Scientist’s Periodic Table of the Elements and Their Ions differs both in conceptual origin and in form from almost all previous versions.
Science, stories and scholars
