REMEMBERING MICHAEL TALBOT
I met Mike Talbot in 1976 at the University of Ghana at Legon, to which he had been sent by the geology department at Leeds. The University of Ghana in those days was the most lively, challenging and intellectually stimulating institution I have ever visited; Mike was one of the people who made it so. He was a sedimentologist, and his earlier African work had been on Saharan dunes. Ghana is too wet for desert so Mike turned his attention to Lake Bosomtwe, occupying a million-year old astrobleme. He looked at raised lake beds in the crater, but craved access to the sediments under the lake. I had returned to Ghana to core Lake Bosomtwe, and those cores became the basis for our life-long collaboration.
Mike had an extremely sharp eye. He stands out among sedimentologists I have watched at work for the way he used his eyes to understand the processes that formed lake sediment. Only Dick Hay was comparable. Mike went on to use analytical methods, especially XRD, to extend his understanding, but it was the way he used his eyes to examine our cores, and his pencil to record the results, that was initially most impressive.
He used his eyes for more than geology. The first time he saw the coast of North Carolina he was already familiar with our shore birds, having met them in Britain or Africa. More surprising was the ease with which he identified, at least to genus, every marine mollusk. He learned them to teach invertebrate paleontology.
Mike was very fit, vigorous, and lean as whipcord. He should have lived to ripe old age. We need him, his eyes, and his synthetic ability, especially now that we have cores covering the entire million-year history of Bosomtwe, and comparable lengths of time for other ancient lakes.