Acceptance of the SEG Waldemar Lindgren Award for 2005

Abstract

Mr. President, colleagues, and friends: It is with great pleasure that I accept the Waldemar Lindgren Medal of the Society of Economic Geologists this evening. This is truly an honor and quite humbling, and I would like to thank my colleagues, Jan Peter, Mike Lesher, Wayne Goodfellow, and Dave Lentz, for nominating me. I think I was destined to become a geologist. As a child, I remember searching for fossils and pyrite in shales in rocks of nearby limestone quarries of my home in western Newfoundland. I was always impressed with the beauty of the landscape in this area, particularly the Bay of Islands and how it came to be. It was this early interest in the landscape and rocks that led me to take a geology course in my last year of high school. Geology was not a subject taken by many; typically this course was taken to bump up your marks before going to university and then to be forgotten promptly after the final exam. Fortunately, I had an outstanding teacher, Mr. Roger Chaytor, and it was his lectures on plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading that made me decide to try geology at university. I was fortunate to attend Memorial University of Newfoundland. Memorial’s undergraduate program was truly outstanding—it provided all the basics and was very field oriented. It seemed we were in the field all the time and it made me realize that most problems in earth sciences required field observations to solve them and are in one way or another linked to tectonics. A number of people had significant influence on me while I was a student at Memorial. Bill Iams, my first-year professor, taught with such exuberance and excitement that it made me realize that I made the right decision to enter geology; he also …