Acoustic emission signals carry much of the information about collapsing cavities and progressing cracks in minerals. The acoustic noise signals are constituted by individual events, so-called “jerks,” which form a spectrum of “crackling noise” with well-defined characteristics. The close connection between collapsing minerals under uniaxial stress and the spectra of crackling noise has been systematically investigated over the last 5 years on small samples, but it is only in a new paper in American Mineralogist that Jiang et al. (2016) have made a major breakthrough by using much larger samples and higher stresses. They show that crackling noises change their...