Meeting Report
SOTA7: State of the [Continental] Arc
In September 2018, 32 participants from 25 institutions took part in the highest-altitude State of the Arc (SOTA) meeting yet: SOTA7. Participants spent a week in San Pedro in the Chilean Atacama Desert, situated on top of the world’s thickest continental arc crust. A mixture of keynote, regular, and “pop-up” talks and posters explored the realms of geochemistry, geophysics, experimental petrology, and numerical models to address topics in arc magmatism: these included volcano “personality”, the movement of volatiles, compositional evolution, how to match geophysical studies with petrology, and how eruptions are triggered.
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 MoreLithium — 200 Years: Meeting Report
Lithium was discovered in 1818 in petalite from pegmatites on Utö (Sweden), an island in the Stockholm archipelago, by Johan August Arfwedson (1792–1841), a student working in the laboratory of Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), the famous Swedish chemist. To commemorate the 200th anniversary, the Swedish Mineralogical Society (SMS), with the support of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, organized a symposium held at the museum (Fig. 1) followed by a two-day field trip to Utö Island, where it is still possible to collect petalite and other lithium minerals and to study the geological context of the lithium–cesium–tantalum (LCT) pegmatites in which the lithium minerals occur.
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