Note from the Hubbert Quorum

Abstract

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USASince 1993 the ‘‘Hubbert Quorum’’ has met annually onthe day prior to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysi-cal Union (AGU) in San Francisco. The purpose of this one-day meeting at the USGS-Menlo Park facility is to bringtogether hydrogeologists and geoscientists who are inter-ested in geologic processes associated with crustal fluids.Frequently these researchers work on topics that haveapplication to fields outside of hydrology such as faultmechanics, volcanology, and economic geology (see http://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/hydrotherm/Hubbert.htm).The Hubbert Quorum was originally inspired by thesuccess of the Gilbert Club, which has met annually since1983 on the day after the AGU Fall Meeting (see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~geomorph/gilbert.htm). The Gil-bert Club, which takes place at the University of Califor-nia-Berkeley, was conceived as an opportunity for thegeomorphology community to hear major talks, debatenew ideas, and encourage community-level discussion ofissues. It is named after the great geoscientist Grove KarlGilbert (Bourgeois, 1998). Similarly, the Hubbert Quoruminvokes the name of the eminent geophysicist Marion KingHubbert, who contributed immensely to the understand-ing of the role of fluids in geologic processes (e.g., Hub-bert, 1940, 1953; Hubbert and Willis, 1957; Hubbert andRubey, 1959) and also had an abiding interest in the sig-nificance of Earth resources in human affairs (e.g., Hub-bert, 1949, 1956, 1967).Like the Gilbert Club, the Hubbert Quorum has no for-mal affiliation with any organization and has always beenan open meeting, advertised through email. The intent isto enable an informal group of natural-process-orientedscientists to freely exchange ideas on an annual basis. Pre-sentations are made on a voluntary basis and all partici-pants are invited to present their work.The Quorum is an all-day affair beginning at 11:00 AMand adjourning at 6:00 PM. The meeting begins with an‘‘icebreaker’’ brunch and is followed by several extended(20 min), and short (10 min) presentations. The goal is toavoid the hectic pace of typical meetings by providingample time for open discussion and questions during andfollowing each presentation. All speakers are encouragedto initiate discussion by presenting work in progress, ratherthan a canned talk.The past few decades have seen substantial growth ofinterest in the role of fluids in geologic processes. Hydro-geologists and other geoscientists are actively exploringthe role of groundwater and other subsurface fluids insuch fundamental geologic processes as crustal heat trans-fer, ore deposition, hydrocarbon migration, earthquakes,tectonic deformation, diagenesis, and metamorphism. Thegrowing interest in such problems is indicated by thepopularity of regularly scheduled meetings on ‘‘Water-Rock Interaction’’ and ‘‘Geofluids,’’ by Penrose Confer-ences such as ‘‘Continental Magmatic-HydrothermalSystems’’ (2004), and by an increasing number of relatedsymposia at annual meetings of organizations such asAGU.In keeping with this community-wide trend, the 15thHubbert Quorum on December 9, 2007, was the largestever, attracting 55 participants who represented a wide rangeof topical expertise and diverse institutions and countries.The first two speakers were from ETH-Zurich and presentedcomplementary talks that described progress in modelingmultiphase, multicomponent, higher-temperature (trans-critical point) hydrothermal flow. Thomas Driesnerdescribed some of the associated computational challengesin his talk titled The not-so-trivial side of combining the ther-modynamics and flow of H