Comment [on “Synchrotron sheds new light on geophysical materials”]

Thank you for the excellent synchrotron article (Eos, February 11, 1997, pp. 61–62). However, the “first light” experiments at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory on December 20, 1996, do not “mark the dawn of a new era of rock and mineral physics.” Third-generation synchrotron radiation sources have been used at the Cornell CHESS facility for geoscience research for many years. For example, we used this facility with Barnes Bierck and Tammo Steenhuis to study consolidation and flow in geophysical materials in 1994.