Posts by Elements
Book Review — Thermodynamics in Earth and Planetary Sciences
Thermodynamics is a vast subject with a long and complex history. It is now about two hundred years since the general acceptance of the ideal gas equation of state (PV = nRT) (e.g., Biot 1816) and the discovery of limiting behaviour in the high temperature heat capacity of elemental solids (Petit and Dulong 1819). Since then, empirical thermodynamic laws and statistical thermodynamic models have revolutionised our understanding of a myriad of physical and chemical processes and material properties. Thermodynamics underpins much of our modern lifestyle and our understanding of the natural world. It plays, in the words of Russian Nobel laureate in chemistry Ilya Prigogine, “a fundamental role far beyond its original scope” (Prigogine 1977).
Read MoreHandbook of Luminescence Dating
Quartz and feldspar are ubiquitous and amazing minerals because they record a stored signal that can be accessed to establish the time that elapsed since that mineral was last exposed to sunlight (or heated from ~100 °C to 400 °C). In the Handbook of Luminescence Dating, a cast of expert-practitioners explore the wide range of luminescence dating applications that are employed by Quaternary scientists, archaeologists and geologists.
Read MoreMont Saint-Hilaire: History, Geology, Mineralogy
About 40 km east of Montreal in Quebec (Canada), the modest hill named Mont Saint-Hilaire (MSH) reaches only 415 meters. But the quarry on its northeastern flank is one of the world’s richest mineral localities, having yielded up 434 species and 66 type minerals. There are only two locations with more type minerals: Långban (Sweden) has 74 type minerals, and Tsumeb (Namibia) has 72. It was a pleasure receiving the new monograph on MSH: it is about 650 pages long, weighs in at ~2.3 kilograms, and is packed with thoroughly documented text and excellent photos.
Read MoreNew Mineral Named in Honor of Barbara Dutrow
Professor Barbara L. Dutrow is the Gerald Cire and Lena Grand Williams Alumni Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Louisiana State University (USA) and she has been honored by having a newly discovered mineral species of the tourmaline group named after her: dutrowite.
Read Morev15n4 People in the News
Professor Donald Bruce Dingwell, Director of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Munich (Germany), has been awarded the Volcanology and Igneous Petrology (VIP) Career Achievement Award from the Geological Association of Canada (GAC) for his lifelong contributions to volcanology and igneous petrology.
Read MoreSpot the Dot …
Can you locate Mercury
as it hovers over the Sun during its 2016 transit?
v14n6 People in the News
AGU 2018 Fellows, ACA Buerger Award to Frank Hawthorne, and Geological Society of America 2018 Medal Awards
Read MoreXXII General Meeting of the International Association of Mineralogy (IMA2018)
The XXII General Meeting of the International Mineralogical Association, IMA2018, was held 13–17 August 2018 at the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre in beautiful downtown Melbourne (Australia) and was hosted by the Geological Society of Australia (https://www.gsa.org.au/). Six hundred people from 38 different countries attended five days of talks, one day of workshops, and pre- and post-conference field trips.
Read MoreThe 28th V.M. Goldschmidt Conference
The 28th V.M. Goldschmidt Conference, organized by the Geochemical Society (GS) and the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG), was held 12–17 August 2018 in Boston (Massachusetts, USA). Nearly 3,100 delegates participated in the six-day meeting (Sunday through Friday), making it the largest North American Goldschmidt Conference to date.
Read Morev14n3 People in the News
Barbara L. Dutrow, Adolphe G. Gueymard Professor of Geology at the Louisiana State University (USA), was elected to the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). Frank C. Hawthorne, Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba (Canada) was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada on 29 December 2017.
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