Posted on by Masami

A Beautiful Job

Today Akinori showed me (finally!) a message he got from one of the reviewers who has been currently reviewing his article. About a month ago he submitted a paper titled “Oxygen isotope evidence for the late Miocene development of an orographic rain shadow in eastern Washington, USA” to “GEOLOGY” as his first-author paper with a co-author, Dr. Peter Larson, his advisor. In a field of Geology, this journal of “GEOLOGY” has a pretty high reputation, probably the second to the “Nature” or the “Science,” according to Akinori.
Some people, including some graduate students and professors in Geology, were first skeptical about the value of his research and the paper. His research was very new and his methods were also relatively new, so as in human nature, people went kind of “neophobic,” I suppose.
However, it turned out, very preciously, his research and the paper were super-dooper great! Here is a letter from the reviewer.

Hi, I very much enjoyed reading your Geology manuscript. That is a fine piece of research. You did some very hard work and produced a beautiful manuscript. To give you a heads-up I recommended a few things which you might want to consider in advance of getting the other reviews. Cheers!

It sounds really great, but then the attachment file had an official review that was supposed to go to the editors of “GEOLOGY,” and was even greater!

The paper by Takeuchi and Larson presents an interesting and excellent data set that provides the best evidence to date on the timing and magnitude of surface uplift of the central Cascades. The authors use oxygen isotope values of smectite to track the dalta-18 Oxygen of precipitation through time and use this to constrain surface uplift. As someone who has analyzed the isotopic values of authigenic clay minerals I realize that this is a hard-earned data set and is by far the best oxygen isotope proxy for paleoprecipitation in terrestrial rocks. The paper is further strengthened by the fact that the stable isotopic data can be compared with the recently published (U-Th)/He apatite of Reiners et al. (2002) which also indicate late Miocene uplift of the Cascades. As such, this is a superb paper that should be published with minimal revisions.

And some suggested revisions (6 of them) were listed. I don’t think I would write them here because about 90% of readers (including a writer here!) would not understand well enough…
I’m so excited because I have never seen such a great review along with some complements! AND it’s from GEOLOGY! The underline beneath “best” was actually there, it was not something I added here. Akinori always holds a word “beautiful” in his mind. He has a kind of philosophy that every single element in his research has to be in a shape of “beauty” in a sense. So I guess he really did a beautiful job to write up such a beautiful paper. I’m soooo happy for him and so proud.

2 Replies to “A Beautiful Job”

  1. Hey!! I’m also happy to hear this grateful news! It is really exciting that someone I know will be known as great and unique scientist in the whole world!! I’m pretty sure that I don’t understand what he is researching about, but keep going on the fabulous work!!

    Reply

  2. Hiromi: Yeah that’s exactly how I felt. I don’t understand a thing, but whatever that is, he seems to be doing well right? Thanks for your warm message, I’m sure he is reading it and appreciating it very much!

    Reply

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