This fall Douglas Rumble was elected vice president of the Mineralogical Society of America for 2002 and president for 2003. He was also elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America.

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Bjørn Mysen was part of the organizing committee for the fourth of the biannual joint symposia involving GL; the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, Bayreuth, Germany; and the Institute for the Study of the Earth’s Interior, Okayama U., Japan. The symposium, which was held in Kurayoshi, Japan, Oct. 3-5, focused on “Transport of Materials in the Dynamic Earth” and drew participants from nine countries. GL was represented by Yingwei Fei, Rus Hemley, Dave Mao, Bjørn Mysen, Jie Li, Wim van Westrenen, James Van Orman, Chrystele Sanloup, and Kenji Mibe. The symposia are held as a part of the collaborative research efforts involving the three labs. The next meeting will be held in fall 2003. The topic will be “Fluids and Melts in the Earth,” and GL will serve as local host.

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Bjørn Mysen spent May through July as an IPGP Fellow at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris working on the physics of silicate glasses and melts with Pascal Richet and colleagues. While there, he lectured on “Hydrous Melts and Silicate-Rich Fluids during Materials Recycling in Subduction Zones” and on “Silicate Solubility and Solution Mechanisms in Aqueous Fluids at High Pressure and Temperature” at the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, U. Paris VI-VII.

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In Dec. Charles Prewitt and Rus Hemley organized a special session at the fall AGU meeting, “Fortieth Anniversary of the Synthesis and Discovery of Stishovite,” consisting of 25 different presentations related to the mineral stishovite. In 1961 Stishov and Popova reported the synthesis of a new modification of silica, and in 1962 Chao, Fahey, Littler, and Milton discovered the same phase in nature and published the paper “Stishovite, SiO₂, a Very High Pressure New Mineral from Meteor Crater, Arizona.” These and other discoveries foreshadowed a wide range of activities transforming the discipline of high-pressure mineralogy/mineral physics into an essential component of Earth science research, and they have had a major impact on high-pressure research in materials science, condensed-matter physics, and solid-state chemistry.

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From Sept.1 to Sept. 13 Neil Irvine, Jens Christian Andersen from the Camborne School of Mines of U. Exeter in Cornwall, and Kent Brooks from U. Copenhagen led a group of 33 scientists and others to the Skaergaard igneous intrusion in East Greenland. Participants came from England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Israel, South Africa, Canada, and the USA. They began the trip in Keflavik, Iceland, where they boarded a Russian cruise ship. They then crossed the Strait of Denmark to the intrusion, which lies just above the Arctic Circle in a prominent fjord called Kangerdlugssuaq. The intrusion, which is unparalleled in its exposure, has been studied since 1970 and has been found to contain a zone of almost ore-grade gold and palladium enrichment. The group enjoyed a program of day treks over the intrusion and seminars held on the ship. One geologist said, “It will remain the geological highlight of my life.”

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James Scott of GL spent four weeks from July to Aug. in Tanzania examining the role of chemoautolithotrophic bacteria in the cycling of nutrients from the anaerobic deepwater to the oxic waters of Lake Tanganyika. Lake Tanganyika, the world’s second largest lake, is also its deepest and oldest and is a biogeochemical treasure chest. Scott spent 10 days on an expedition from the Kigoma Bay region to south of the Mahale Mountains gathering water and sediment samples for analysis.

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Jan Toporski has been appointed a postdoctoral associate at GL and is working in astrobiology in close collaboration with Andrew Steele. Toporski received his Ph.D. from U. Portsmouth, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Portsmouth, UK. His thesis was “The Preservation and Detection of Morphological and Molecular Bacterial Biomarkers and Their Implications for Astrobiological Research.” Recently hewas granted the inaugural Gerry Soffen Award for the best paper submitted by a graduate student to the journal Astrobiology. His work is on the fossilization of bacterial cells using silica, and his experiments have yielded an unexpected discovery of nanocrystallites of a yet unknown silica phase in the cell walls of fossilized cells. This confounds the idea that fossilization produces amorphous phases only, and further studies are under way. He hopes this approach can be used in future space exploration and life detection studies.

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Robert Hazen presented the first lecture in the AAAS series “Dialogues in Science, Ethics and Religion.” He was filmed by the History Channel’s Modern Marvels for an episode on the wheel, and gave invited lectures on astrobiology themes at U. Delaware; U. Massachusetts; Amherst; the American Type Culture Collection; the Astrobiology Institute of Spain in Madrid; and the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

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Ho-Kwang (Dave) Mao gave an invited talk, “Future Perspectives on High-Pressure Experimental Geophysics and Geochemistry,” at the International Symposium “Transport of Materials in the Dynamic Earth,” Oct. 2-5, in Kurayoshi, Japan. Also in Oct., he presented an invited talk, “Phonon Dynamics of Iron at Earth’s Core Conditions,” at the 11th APS User’s Meeting in Chicago, and gave an invited colloquium talk, “New Windows on the Earth’s Deep Interior,” at U. Illinois-Champaign/Urbana. Later that month he addressed the DOE/BES Program Review of the Advanced Photon Source, APS, Chicago, on “Phonon Density of States in Iron up to 153 Gpa.” He gave an invited talk, “High Pressure—A New Dimension in Physical Science,” at a Special HiP/Lujan Joint Seminar at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Oct. and at the James Franck Institute Colloquium, U. Chicago, in Jan. Also in Jan., he presented an invited talk, “Absolute Pressure-temperature-density Determinations of Mantle Minerals,” at the Superplume Workshop Tokyo, Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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Guangtian Zou, professor and director of the National Laboratory of Superhard Materials, Jilin University, has added membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences to his many other affiliations. He was elected to the academy in Sept. 2001. Zou has been associated with GL since 1980. He is one of the pioneers in understanding the Earth’s mantle under —

GL fellow Anurag Sharma gave a talk, “A Window into Hydrothermal Systems,” at the Gordon Research Conference on the Origin of Life held in Ventura, CA, on Jan. 6-11. James Scott also attended the conference.

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Anurag and Carol Sharma had a new baby boy, Peter Naveen, on Jan. 9. —

Two 2001 summer interns, Victoria E. Lee (Yale U.) and Barry L. Reno (Trinity
U.), presented posters at the fall meeting of the AGU in San Francisco. Lee’s poster title was “X-ray Diffraction and Raman Spectroscopy of SrGeO₃ at High Pressure,” and Reno’s was “Temperature and Compositional Dependence of Hydroxyl Solubility in Coesite.”

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New Position