YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARD (DONATH MEDAL) LECTURE

Elementary through high school years were not dazzling. Reading a clock was tricky, focusing the mind was futile, math was mysterious, nobody could understand me, I wasn’t good at anything. But there are turning points. My parents and family friends Doug Morton and John Bolm got me interested in birds and I soon found myself devoting 100 % of my time on birds, letting everything else fall by the wayside. For the first time in my life I was actually good at something. My parents told me, “If you love something and work hard, you can be good”. I didn’t know that bird-jobs existed then, so wandered aimlessly in Berkeley until I took geology classes from Rudy Wenk and George Brimhall. I already knew some geology through osmosis from my geophysicist father, micro-paleontologist mother, and field geologist Doug Morton, but to see other people having so much fun with geology was eye-opening. I soon found myself fascinated with every aspect of the earth sciences. With this new sense of purpose, math and physics became fun. Wind clock forward. All of my research directions can be traced back to individuals who inspired me. My interest in the origin and evolution of the continents dates back to Roberta Rudnick (my PhD adviser), William McDonough, George Brimhall and Doug Morton. Qingzhu Yin let me into his mind. Linking geochemistry with geodynamics was Don DePaolo and Michael Manga. Gerald Wasserburg and Richard O’Connell showed me the elegance of simple modeling. Ian Carmichael and Francis Albarede seeded me with oxygen fugacity and silica activity as a potential barometer, concepts that I have been fortunate enough to pursue with Dante Canil, William Leeman and Terry Plank. However, the freedom to pursue these ideas was made possible only by the peculiar environment of Rice University – my home for the last 7 years. My journey has been filled with depths of despair and fits of epiphanies that only my wife and perhaps some of my students and post-docts can appreciate. My dues have not yet been paid to all these great people, but I am still trying. On my mind right now is what can basalts tell us about the temperature and composition of the mantle? I will take you through a tour of recent developments in magma thermobarometry and how it can be used (and abused) to constrain the Earth’s temperature. I will end upon my recent love affair with Zn and all its secret powers.