Acceptance of the Waldemar Lindgren Award for 2000

Abstract

Members and friends of the Society of Economic Geologists, President Franklin: First of all, I’d like to express my thanks to SEG for giving me this award. It is unexpected, but certainly not unappreciated, and I am overwhelmed when I consider those who have won this award in years past and the work they have done in their subsequent careers. Receiving this award has caused me to reflect on how and why I started to work on geochemistry, volcanology, and ore deposits, and I want to share with you some of my reflections. Although I am not an economic geologist, per se, I try to apply my research with an eye toward understanding the sorts of processes that interest economic geologists, because those processes also fascinate me. There’s probably no better way to summarize my interest than to quote Waldemar Lindgren, for whom this award is named. Regarding the science of mineral deposits, he wrote, it records the principles governing the cycles of concentration of the elements. It traces the processes by which the primeval gases and magmas have become differentiated into the manifold complexity of the earth’s crust. To rephrase in less poetic words, the Earth wasn’t born with ore deposits. It had to make them. And so, by studying those primeval gases and the magmas that they come from, we can contribute to the fundamental understanding of how earth materials differentiate...how a homogeneous slurry with only a part-per-billion of a metal can unmix to create a heterogeneous crust with narrow seams of high-grade ore, kilometer-sized zones of disseminated mineralization, and dazzling, euhedral gems as big as your fist. Another thing that I personally treasure about economic geology is its history. There may be no …